@ 6ad3e2a3:c90b7740

I’ve occasionally been called cynical because some of the sentiments I express strike people as negative. But cynical, to me, does not strictly mean negative. It means something more along the lines of “faithless” — as in lacking the basic faith humans thrive when believing what they take to be true, rather than expedient, and doing what they think is right rather than narrowly advantageous.

In other words, my primary negative sentiment — that the cynical utilitarian ethos among our educated classes has caused and is likely to cause catastrophic outcomes — stems from a sort of disappointed idealism, not cynicism.

On human nature itself I am anything but cynical. I am convinced the strongest, long-term incentives are always to believe what is true, no matter the cost, and to do what is right. And by “right,” I don’t mean do-gooding bullshit, but things like taking care of one’s health, immediate family and personal responsibilities while pursuing the things one finds most compelling and important.

That aside, I want to touch on two real-world examples of what I take to be actual cynicism. The first is the tendency to invoke principles only when they suit one’s agenda or desired outcome, but not to apply them when they do not. This kind of hypocrisy implies principles are just tools you invoke to gain emotional support for your side and that anyone actually applying them evenhandedly is a naive simpleton who doesn’t know how the game is played.

Twitter threads don’t show up on substack anymore, but I’d encourage you to read this one with respect to objecting to election outcomes. I could have used many others, but this one (probably not even most egregious) illustrates how empty words like “democracy” or “election integrity” are when thrown around by devoted partisans. They don’t actually believe in democracy, only in using the word to evoke the desired emotional response. People who wanted to coerce people to take a Pfizer shot don’t believe in “bodily autonomy.” It’s similarly just a phrase that’s invoked to achieve an end.

The other flavor of cynicism I’ve noticed is less about hypocrisy and more about nihilism:

I’d encourage people to read the entire thread, but if you’re not on Twitter, it’s essentially about whether money (and apparently anything else) has essential qualities, or whether it is whatever peoples’ narratives tell them it is.

In other words, is money whatever your grocer takes for the groceries, or do particular forms of money have qualities wherein they are more likely to be accepted over the long haul? The argument is yes, gold, for example had qualities that made it a better money (scarcity, durability, e.g.) than say seashells which are reasonably durable but not scarce. You could sell the story of seashells as a money (and some societies not close to the sea used them as such), but ultimately such a society would be vulnerable to massive inflation should one of its inhabitants ever stroll along a shore.

The thread morphed into whether everything is just narrative, or there is an underlying reality to which a narrative must correspond in order for it to be useful and true.

The notion that anything could be money if attached to the right story, or any music is good if it’s marketed properly is deeply cynical. I am not arguing people can’t be convinced to buy bad records — clearly they can — but that no matter how much you market it, it will not stand the test of time unless it is in fact good.

In order to sell something that does not add value, meaning or utility to someone’s life, something you suspect they are likely to regret buying in short order, it’s awfully useful to convince yourself that nothing has inherent meaning or value, that “storytelling is all that matters.”

I am not against marketing per se, and effective storytelling might in fact point someone in the right direction — a good story can help someone discover a truth. But that storytelling is everything, and by implication the extent to which a story has correlates in reality nothing, is the ethos of scammers, the refuge of nihilists who left someone else holding the bag and prefer not to think about it.

@ c4f5e7a7:8856cac7

TL;DR

Best viewed on either YakiHonne or Highlighter.

This article explores the links between public, community-driven data sources (such as OpenStreetMap) and private, cryptographically-owned data found on networks such as Nostr.

The following concepts are explored:

1. Attestations: Users signalling to their social graph that they believe something to be true by publishing Attestations. These social proofs act as a decentralised verification system that leverages your web-of-trust.
2. Proof of Place: An oracle-based system where physical letters are sent to real-world locations, confirming the corresponding digital ownership via cryptographic proofs. This binds physical locations in meatspace with their digital representations in the Nostrverse.
3. Check-ins: Foursquare-style check-ins that can be verified using attestations from place owners, ensuring authenticity. This approach uses web-of-trust to validate check-ins and location ownership over time.

The goal is to leverage cryptographic ownership where necessary while preserving the open, collaborative nature of public data systems.

Open Data in a public commons has a place and should not be thrown out with the Web 2.0 bathwater.

Cognitive Dissonance

Ever since discovering Nostr in August of 2022 I've been grappling with how BTC Map - a project that helps bitcoiners find places to spend sats - should most appropriately use this new protocol.

I am assuming, dear reader, that you are somewhat familiar with Nostr - a relatively new protocol for decentralised identity and communication. If you don’t know your nsec from your npub, please take some time to read these excellent posts: Nostr is Identity for the Internet and The Power of Nostr by @max and @lyn, respectively. Nostr is so much more than a short-form social media replacement.

The social features (check-ins, reviews, etc.) that Nostr unlocks for BTC Map are clear and exciting - all your silos are indeed broken - however, something fundamental has been bothering me for a while and I think it comes down to data ownership.

For those unfamiliar, BTC Map uses OpenStreetMap (OSM) as its main geographic database. OSM is centred on the concept of a commons of objectively verifiable data that is maintained by a global community of volunteer editors; a Wikipedia for maps. There is no data ownership; the data is free (as in freedom) and anyone can edit anything. It is the data equivalent of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) - FOSD if you will, but more commonly referred to as Open Data.

In contrast, Notes and Other Stuff on Nostr (Places in this cartographic context) are explicitly owned by the controller of the private key. These notes are free to propagate, but they are owned.

How do we reconcile the decentralised nature of Nostr, where data is cryptographically owned by individuals, with the community-managed data commons of OpenStreetMap, where no one owns the data?

Self-sovereign Identity

Before I address this coexistence question, I want to talk a little about identity as it pertains to ownership. If something is to be owned, it has to be owned by someone or something - an identity.

All identities that are not self-sovereign are, by definition, leased to you by a 3rd party. You rent your Facebook identity from Meta in exchange for your data. You rent your web domain from your DNS provider in exchange for your money.

Taken to the extreme, you rent your passport from your Government in exchange for your compliance. You are you at the pleasure of others. Where Bitcoin separates money from the state; Nostr separates identity from the state.

Or, as @nvk said recently: "Don't build your house on someone else's land.".

While we’ve had the tools for self-sovereign digital identity for decades (think PGP keys or WebAuthN), we haven't had the necessary social use cases nor the corresponding social graph to elevate these identities to the mainstream. Nostr fixes this.

Nostr is PGP for the masses and will take cryptographic identities mainstream.

Full NOSTARD?

Returning to the coexistence question: the data on OpenStreetMap isn’t directly owned by anyone, even though the physical entities the data represents might be privately owned. OSM is a data commons.

We can objectively agree on the location of a tree or a fire hydrant without needing permission to observe and record it. Sure, you could place a tree ‘on Nostr’, but why should you? Just because something can be ‘on Nostr’ doesn’t mean it should be.

There might be a dystopian future where we can't agree on what a tree is nor where it's located, but I hope we never get there. It's at this point we'll need a Wikifreedia variant of OpenStreetMap.

While integrating Nostr identities into OpenStreetMap would be valuable, the current OSM infrastructure, tools, and community already provide substantial benefits in managing this data commons without needing to go NOSTR-native - there's no need to go Full NOSTARD. H/T to @princeySOV for the original meme.

So, how do we appropriately blend cryptographically owned data with the commons?

If a location is owned in meatspace and it's useful to signal that ownership, it should also be owned in cyberspace. Our efforts should therefore focus on entities like businesses, while allowing the commons to manage public data for as long as it can successfully mitigate the tragedy of the commons.

The remainder of this article explores how we can:

1. Verify ownership of a physical place in the real world;
2. Link that ownership to the corresponding digital place in cyberspace.

As a side note, I don't see private key custodianship - or, even worse, permissioned use of Places signed by another identity's key - as any more viable than the rented identities of Web 2.0.

And as we all know, the Second Law of Infodynamics (no citation!) states that:

"The total amount of sensitive information leaked or exposed will always increase over time."

This especially holds true if that data is centralised.

Not your keys, not your notes. Not your keys, not your identity.

Places and Web-of-Trust

@Arkinox has been leading the charge on the Places NIP, introducing Nostr notes (kind 37515) that represent physical locations. The draft is well-crafted, with bonus points for linking back to OSM (and other location repositories) via NIP-73 - External Content IDs (championed by @oscar of @fountain).

However, as Nostr is permissionless, authenticity poses a challenge. Just because someone claims to own a physical location on the Internet doesn’t necessarily mean they have ownership or control of that location in the real world.

Ultimately, this problem can only be solved in a decentralised way by using Web-of-Trust - using your social graph and the perspectives of trusted peers to inform your own perspective. In the context of Places, this requires your network to form a view on which digital identity (public key / npub) is truly the owner of a physical place like your local coffee shop.

This requires users to:

1. Verify the owner of a Place in cyberspace is the owner of a place in meatspace.
2. Signal this verification to their social graph.

Let's look at the latter idea first with the concept of Attestations ...

Attestations

A way to signal to your social graph that you believe something to be true (or false for that matter) would be by publishing an Attestation note. An Attestation note would signify to your social graph that you think something is either true or false.

Imagine you're a regular at a local coffee shop. You publish an Attestation that says the shop is real and the owner behind the Nostr public key is who they claim to be. Your friends trust you, so they start trusting the shop's digital identity too.

However, attestations applied to Places are just a single use case. The attestation concept could be more widely applied across Nostr in a variety of ways (key rotation, identity linking, etc).

Here is a recent example from @lyn that would carry more signal if it were an Attestation:

Parallels can be drawn between Attestations and transaction confirmations on the Bitcoin timechain; however, their importance to you would be weighted by clients and/or Data Vending Machines in accordance with:

1. Your social graph;
2. The type or subject of the content being attested and by whom;
3. Your personal preferences.

They could also have a validity duration to be temporally bound, which would be particularly useful in the case of Places.

NIP-25 (Reactions) do allow for users to up/downvote notes with optional content (e.g., emojis) and could work for Attestations, but I think we need something less ambiguous and more definitive. ‘This is true’ resonates more strongly than ‘I like this.’.

There are similar concepts in the Web 3 / Web 5 world such as Verified Credentials by tdb; however, Nostr is the Web 3 now and so wen Attestation NIP?

That said, I have seen @utxo has been exploring ‘smart contracts’ on nostr and Attestations may just be a relatively ‘dumb’ subset of the wider concept Nostr-native scripting combined with web-of-trust.

Proof of Place

Attestations handle the signalling of your truth, but what about the initial verification itself?

We already coved how this ultimately has to be derived from your social graph, but what if there was a way to help bootstrap this web-of-trust through the use of oracles? For those unfamiliar with oracles in the digital realm, they are simply trusted purveyors of truth.

Introducing Proof of Place, an out–of-band process where an oracle, such as BTC Map, would mail - yes mail a physical letter - a shared secret to the physical location being claimed in cyberspace. This shared secret would be locked to the public key (npub) making the claim, which, if unlocked, would prove that the associated private key (nsec) has physical access to the location in meatspace.

Proof of Place is really nothing more than a weighted Attestation. In a web-of-trust Nostrverse, an oracle is simply a npub (say BTC Map) that you weigh heavily for its opinion on a given topic (say Places).

In the Bitcoin world, Proof of Work anchors digital scarcity in cyberspace to physical scarcity (energy and time) in meatspace and as @Gigi says in PoW is Essential:

"A failure to understand Proof of Work, is a failure to understand Bitcoin."

In the Nostrverse, Proof of Place helps bridge the digital and physical worlds.

@Gigi also observes in Memes vs The World that:

"In Bitcoin, the map is the territory. We can infer everything we care about by looking at the map alone."

This isn’t true for Nostr.

In the Nostrverse, the map IS NOT the territory. However, Proof of Place enables us to send cryptographic drones down into the physical territory to help us interpret our digital maps. 🤯

Check-ins

Although not a draft NIP yet, @Arkinox has also been exploring the familiar concept of Foursquare-style Check-ins on Nostr (with kind 13811 notes).

For the uninitiated, Check-ins are simply notes that signal the publisher is at a given location. These locations could be Places (in the Nostr sense) or any other given digital representation of a location for that matter (such as OSM elements) if NIP-73 - External Content IDs are used.

Of course, not everyone will be a Check-in enjoyooor as the concept will not sit well with some people’s threat models and OpSec practices.

Bringing Check-ins to Nostr is possible (as @sebastix capably shows here), but they suffer the same authenticity issues as Places. Just because I say I'm at a given location doesn't mean that I am.

Back in the Web 2.0 days, Foursquare mitigated this by relying on the GPS position of the phone running their app, but this is of course spoofable.

How should we approach Check-in verifiability in the Nostrverse? Well, just like with Places, we can use Attestations and WoT. In the context of Check-ins, an Attestation from the identity (npub) of the Place being checked-in to would be a particularly strong signal. An NFC device could be placed in a coffee shop and attest to check-ins without requiring the owner to manually intervene - I’m sure @blackcoffee and @Ben Arc could hack something together over a weekend!

Check-ins could also be used as a signal for bonafide Place ownership over time.

Summary: Trust Your Bros

So, to recap, we have:

Places: Digital representations of physical locations on Nostr.

Check-ins: Users signalling their presence at a location.

Attestations: Verifiable social proofs used to confirm ownership or the truth of a claim.

You can visualise how these three concepts combine in the diagram below:

And, as always, top right trumps bottom left! We have:

Level 0 - Trust Me Bro: Anyone can check-in anywhere. The Place might not exist or might be impersonating the real place in meatspace. The person behind the npub may not have even been there at all.

Level 1 - Definitely Maybe Somewhere: This category covers the middleground of ‘Maybe at a Place’ and ‘Definitely Somewhere’. In these examples, you are either self-certifying that you have checked-in at an Attested Place or you are having others attest that you have checked-in at a Place that might not even exist IRL.

Level 2 - Trust Your Bros: An Attested Check-in at an Attested Place. Your individual level of trust would be a function of the number of Attestations and how you weigh them within your own social graph.

Perhaps the gold standard (or should that be the Bitcoin standard?) would be a Check-in attested by the owner of the Place, which in itself was attested by BTC Map?

Or perhaps not. Ultimately, it’s the users responsibility to determine what they trust by forming their own perspective within the Nostrverse powered by web-of-trust algorithms they control. ‘Trust Me Bro’ or ‘Trust Your Bros’ - you decide.

As we navigate the frontier of cryptographic ownership and decentralised data commons, it’s up to us to find the balance between preserving the Open Data commons and embracing self-sovereign digital identities.

Thanks

With thanks to Arkinox, Avi, Ben Gunn, Kieran, Blackcoffee, Sebastix, Tomek, Calle, Short Fiat, Ben Weeks and Bitcoms for helping shape my thoughts and refine content, whether you know it or not!

@ ee11a5df:b76c4e49

Bye-Bye Reply Guy

There is a camp of nostr developers that believe spam filtering needs to be done by relays. Or at the very least by DVMs. I concur. In this way, once you configure what you want to see, it applies to all nostr clients.

But we are not there yet.

In the mean time we have ReplyGuy, and gossip needed some changes to deal with it.

Strategies in Short

1. WEB OF TRUST: Only accept events from people you follow, or people they follow - this avoids new people entirely until somebody else that you follow friends them first, which is too restrictive for some people.
2. TRUSTED RELAYS: Allow every post from relays that you trust to do good spam filtering.
3. REJECT FRESH PUBKEYS: Only accept events from people you have seen before - this allows you to find new people, but you will miss their very first post (their second post must count as someone you have seen before, even if you discarded the first post)
4. PATTERN MATCHING: Scan for known spam phrases and words and block those events, either on content or metadata or both or more.
5. TIE-IN TO EXTERNAL SYSTEMS: Require a valid NIP-05, or other nostr event binding their identity to some external identity
6. PROOF OF WORK: Require a minimum proof-of-work

All of these strategies are useful, but they have to be combined properly.

filter.rhai

Gossip loads a file called "filter.rhai" in your gossip directory if it exists. It must be a Rhai language script that meets certain requirements (see the example in the gossip source code directory). Then it applies it to filter spam.

This spam filtering code is being updated currently. It is not even on unstable yet, but it will be there probably tomorrow sometime. Then to master. Eventually to a release.

Here is an example using all of the techniques listed above:

```rhai // This is a sample spam filtering script for the gossip nostr // client. The language is called Rhai, details are at: // https://rhai.rs/book/ // // For gossip to find your spam filtering script, put it in // your gossip profile directory. See // https://docs.rs/dirs/latest/dirs/fn.data_dir.html // to find the base directory. A subdirectory "gossip" is your // gossip data directory which for most people is their profile // directory too. (Note: if you use a GOSSIP_PROFILE, you'll // need to put it one directory deeper into that profile // directory). // // This filter is used to filter out and refuse to process // incoming events as they flow in from relays, and also to // filter which events get/ displayed in certain circumstances. // It is only run on feed-displayable event kinds, and only by // authors you are not following. In case of error, nothing is // filtered. // // You must define a function called 'filter' which returns one // of these constant values: // DENY (the event is filtered out) // ALLOW (the event is allowed through) // MUTE (the event is filtered out, and the author is // automatically muted) // // Your script will be provided the following global variables: // 'caller' - a string that is one of "Process", // "Thread", "Inbox" or "Global" indicating // which part of the code is running your // script // 'content' - the event content as a string // 'id' - the event ID, as a hex string // 'kind' - the event kind as an integer // 'muted' - if the author is in your mute list // 'name' - if we have it, the name of the author // (or your petname), else an empty string // 'nip05valid' - whether nip05 is valid for the author, // as a boolean // 'pow' - the Proof of Work on the event // 'pubkey' - the event author public key, as a hex // string // 'seconds_known' - the number of seconds that the author // of the event has been known to gossip // 'spamsafe' - true only if the event came in from a // relay marked as SpamSafe during Process // (even if the global setting for SpamSafe // is off)

fn filter() {

// Show spam on global
// (global events are ephemeral; these won't grow the
// database)
if caller=="Global" {
    return ALLOW;
}

// Block ReplyGuy
if name.contains("ReplyGuy") || name.contains("ReplyGal") {
    return DENY;
}

// Block known DM spam
// (giftwraps are unwrapped before the content is passed to
//  this script)
if content.to_lower().contains(
  "Mr. Gift and Mrs. Wrap under the tree, KISSING!"
) {
    return DENY;
}

// Reject events from new pubkeys, unless they have a high
// PoW or we somehow already have a nip05valid for them
//
// If this turns out to be a legit person, we will start
// hearing their events 2 seconds from now, so we will
// only miss their very first event.
if seconds_known <= 2 && pow < 25 && !nip05valid {
    return DENY;
}

// Mute offensive people
if content.to_lower().contains(" kike") ||
    content.to_lower().contains("kike ") ||
    content.to_lower().contains(" nigger") ||
    content.to_lower().contains("nigger ")
{
    return MUTE;
}

// Reject events from muted people
//
// Gossip already does this internally, and since we are
// not Process, this is rather redundant. But this works
// as an example.
if muted {
    return DENY;
}

// Accept if the PoW is large enough
if pow >= 25 {
    return ALLOW;
}

// Accept if their NIP-05 is valid
if nip05valid {
    return ALLOW;
}

// Accept if the event came through a spamsafe relay
if spamsafe {
    return ALLOW;
}

// Reject the rest
DENY

} ```

@ bf95e1a4:ebdcc848

This is the lightly-edited AI generated transcript of Bitcoin Infinity Show #125. The transcription isn't perfect, but it's usually pretty good!

If you'd like to support us, send us a zap or check out the Bitcoin Infinity Store for our books and other merchandise! https://bitcoininfinitystore.com/

Intro

Luke: Paolo, Mathias, welcome to the Bitcoin Infinity Show. Thank you for joining us.

Paolo: Thank you for having us.

Knut: Yeah, good to have you here, guys. We're going to talk a bit about Keet and Holepunch and a little bit about Tether today, aren't we?

Luke: Sounds like that's the plan. So thank you again, both for joining us.

Introducing Paolo and Mathias

Luke: would you both mind giving a quick introduction on yourselves just so our listeners have the background on you

Paolo: Sure, I'm Paolo Arduino, I'm the CEO at Tether. I started my career as a developer, I pivoted towards more, strategy and execution for, Tether and Bitfinex. And, co founded with Matthias, Holepunch, that is, building very, crazy and awesome technology, that is gonna be disrupting the way people communicate.

Luke: And, Mathias, over to you.

Mathias: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I've been, so I come from a peer-to-peer background. I've been working with peer-to-peer technology. The last, I always say five, but it's probably more like 10 years. I did a lot of work on BitTorrent and I did a lot of work on JavaScript. and a little bit later to, Bitcoin and I saw a lot of potential on how we can use Bitcoin with pureology and like how we can use.

P2P technology to bring the same mission that Bitcoin has, but to all kinds of data, setting all data free and, making everything private per default and self sovereignty and that kind of thing. I'm very into that. and I've been lucky to work with, like I said, with Paolo for, many years now and, Get a lot of, valuable, feedback and, idea sharing out of that.

And we're on a mission to, build some, really cool things. In addition to all the things we've already been building. So it's super exciting and glad to be here.

Luke: Oh, fantastic.

Introduction to Holepunch

Luke: Matthias, that was a perfect segue into basically, an introduction to, can you tell us about, Holepunch.

What is Holepunch and what are you doing?

Mathias: Yeah, sure. like I said, we co founded the company a couple of years ago. Now, we've been building up a team of really talented peer to peer engineers. we're always hiring also. So if anybody's listening and want to join our mission, please, apply. we have some really smart people working with us.

but we teamed up to basically. like I said in my introduction, I've been working on peer to peer technology for many years now and thinking ahead how we can, stop using all that technology when I started it was only used for basically piracy. I'm from the Nordics, and I think Knut is from the Nordics also, so he knows all about, the Nordics know about piracy.

It wasn't back in the day. A lot of very interesting technologies came out of that. But basically, how can we use those ideas that were proven by piracy back then to be really unstoppable, because a lot of people wanted to stop it, but apply that same kind of mindset to the general data, so we can build actual applications that has that kind of quality, that can withstand the wrath of God.

that can work without any centralization. Actually, nobody can shut down, not even the authorities if they wanted to. Basically unkillable and make that general enough that it can basically run any kind of application, solve a lot of really hot problems. it works on your own computers, your own networks.

Mobile phones, and tie that up. I'm a developer by heart, into a software stack that people can just build on. So not everybody has to go in and tackle all these problems individually, but just give them some software to solve all this so they can, as much as possible, just worry about making really cool applications that we use,

Yeah, like I said, we've been working really intensely on this, for a long time and in Holepunch, we made this our co mission to scale this up and, deliver a software stack on that. it's been really exciting and it's been really fun and it's been very, challenging, but if it's not challenging, then why, do it?

and, especially, with the backing of, Tether, through Paolo and also just expertise from there, we have a good hand built to deliver this to the world. And, the first thing we did was, like, think about what's, a good first application that we can build that can showcase this, but also something we really want to use ourself and see scale have also have on the world.

And obviously that was a communications app, keyed, which we was our first project. And, we're still in beta and we're still lots of work to do. And we're still iterating that really heavily, but I like to show that you can build these kind of apps without any kind of. central points. and we released that also, like the first thing we released when we launched the company.

And like I said, we're still, building and still iterating it. A lot of fun. and then take the software stack from that, which we call the pair runtime and then split that out. So anybody else can build similar apps on top. With that same technology stack, and, yeah, that's, we launched that earlier this year also, and, it's been really exciting so far, and it's, I love going to work every day and solve, even though, you can see on my hair that it's not really good for, the head scratching, but, but, it's really fun, and it's really challenging, and it's interesting thing. goal as a company, basically to have that if we go out of business tomorrow, our technology continues to exist because we're not in the loop of anything. It's also sometimes really hard to explain that we don't have any, chip coins involved or any kind of limitations on the stack because we're basically engineering it not to be part of it, because that's the only way you can actually engineer these things that they can understand.

anything, super exciting and, encourage everybody to try to check it out.

Luke: we've both used Keet and I've certainly enjoyed the experience. I, think, the, basics of this, as I understand it, is that it's, entirely on both sides. The communicators end, or a group of communicators, it's all on their end, and the communication is entirely peer to peer, what is Keet really, what is the basics of Keet as, say, a product?

What is the easiest way that you would explain what it is?

The Vision Behind Keet

Mathias: But We're basically trying to just build a world class communications app that works to a large degree, like normal communication apps that you know, like Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp. Just with all the centralization tucked away, with all the costs of running it tucked away, and then adding all the features that also we can, because we're peer to peer

People don't care about technology. We loved it, but don't have that surface off too much to the user.

Just have the user use it as any other app, but then just have it be 100 percent private per default, 100 percent like no strings attached. It just works. if we get caught off by a. From the internet tomorrow, it will still work, that kind of thing, but deliver that in a way, and this is always our mission where users don't really need to worry about it.

It just works. And, it works the same way to a large degree as their other apps work, except obviously, there's no phone numbers and things like that. Very cryptographically sound and, but trying always not to bubble it up. And I think that's, so it's actually a really simple mission, but it's obviously really hard.

And that requires a lot of smart people, but luckily our users in a good way, don't need to be very smart about that.

Keet vs Nostr

Knut: Yeah, a quick one there. No strings attached starts with the letters Nostr, so is, Keet and Nostr, do they go mix well together or, is there an integration there between the two? I see a lot of similarities here.

Paolo: I tried to explain the differences between Kit and Nostr. I think Nostr is a very interesting protocol, but also is very, simple. the way I like to describe it is that, if you are familiar with the history of filesharing, Starting from the first one, super centralized, and then eventually every single step, you get to a decentralized platform.

And the last one, the most decentralized one, that is BitTorrent. the history of file sharing proved that every time you try to centralize something, it ends up badly, right? if you have any special node in the system that does a little bit more than others and requires more resources than others to run, that will end up badly.

You might end up in a small room with a lamp in your room. Point it to your face, and then everyone suddenly will stop running an indexer. That reminds me about Nostr structure. if you are building a peer to peer system, or if you are building a very resilient communication system, if you think about Nostr, you would imagine that if you have, 10 million or 100 million users, the number of relays would be probably less than the square root of the number of users.

So that surface, although a hundred million users is very, they're not attackable, right? But the surface of, the relays is much more attackable. look at what is happening with, the coin joinin platforms, right? very similar. the beauty of KIT versus Nostr is that in KIT you have number of relays is actually equal to the number of users because the users are their own relays.

and they can act as relays for others to, further their connectivity. That is how we think a technology that, has to be ready for the apocalypse and resilient to the wrath of God should, work. if you have, a log number of users or square root of number of users as relates, I don't think it's cool technology.

It will work better than centralized, Technologies like WhatsApp and so on, or Twitter, but eventually will not work when you will need it the most. Because the point is that we will not know what will happen when we will need this technology the most. Today, not for everyone, but the world is still almost at peace.

Things might unfold, in the future, maybe sooner rather than later. But when things unfold, you will need the best technology, the one that is truly independent, the one that is truly peer to peer. it's not really peer to peer if you have specialized relays, but where you have super peers randomly.

Luke: Yeah, the difference here, between the Realize and not having any other centralized infrastructure in the picture is certainly an interesting distinction. I hadn't heard anything about that you can act as a next connector or something like that.

Pear Runtime

Luke: So there's a couple of related things. I know there was an announcement about the, pair runtime, is that right? can you talk a little bit about that or any other, ways that this is growing in your whole, platform,

Mathias: Yeah, sure. so basically when we talk about ideas, internally, also from our software background, We want to solve a small problem that then can solve it for everybody. So

We want to build technology that can just send data around efficiently, so you can build any kind of app on top. We're all about modularity and taking these things to the extreme so we can repurpose it into any kind of application and other people can, get value out of it.

And, that's been our mission from the get go. So basically, like Paolo said, when we built Keed. We took all of these primitives we have, it's all open source on our GitHub, that can do various things, relay encrypted data in a way that's completely private, nobody can read it, and in a generalizable way, so it can run on any applications.

We have databases that can interpret, work with this data on device, but still in a way where nobody else knows what's going on, fully private, and we spent many years perfecting this, and it's still ongoing. And we, similar to like connectivity, it might seem really easy if you don't know what's going on that, connecting this computer to another computer and another place, but it's really hard because ISPs and, your internet providers, et cetera, they don't really want you to do that.

So there's a lot of firewalls involved that you have to work around to get around This is all really, hard problems that took a long time to solve.

But luckily, all of these are like generalizable problems where you just solve them once to a large degree, and then it's solved for everybody. If you put them in a modular framework where anybody can put the Legos together on top. And that's what we've been heavily invested in. And then as we were building Keed, we realized that Keete is just like 95 percent of these Lego blocks that are applicable for anything.

So why not take all this stuff, pack it up for free, we don't make any money on it. and an open source runtime that we're just giving away so other people can contribute to it, but also build their own apps. the more peer to peer apps the world has, the better from my point of view.

and document it and make it really easy to install. And I think actually Paolo said something interesting because as soon as you have, one point of centralization, you can always unravel it. coming from the Bitcoin days, I remember how quickly things can unravel. people went to jail for linking to things because authorities, when they crack down, really hard.

so if you have one weak spot, it will be taken advantage of at some point by somebody. And so even things like distributing updates to your software can be really hard because this often requires a central point, like you go to a website and you don't download it. And so all apps built on our runtime, for example.

It's distributed through the runtime, which is a little bit mind bending. So all apps are peer to peer data applications themselves, and the network doesn't care, which means that we can continue to distribute updates even, if everything gets shut down, you only need like a bootstrap for the first install when you get the app.

So we're thinking that in. At every level, because it's really, important to us to, basically learn from everything that happened in the past and then actually build things that are resilient. And we take this to a degree where I'm sure we could move 10 times faster if we just let go a little bit of that idea, because it is easier to just put all the data in one place or put all the updates in one place.

But then it's then we're just building the same old thing that's going to die eventually anyway. So we're very, uncompromising in that mission of actually decentralizing everything from updates to data, and then also always solving in a way where everybody can take advantage of that.

And then the final thing I'll say about that is that, every time we update. That runtime, those building blocks of that runtime, every time we fix a bug, every time we make it faster, every app becomes faster. That's also very exciting. It's because you're building the whole infrastructure into this layer that runs on your phone.

And it's all somewhat generalizable. Every time we fix something, it's just better for the entire ecosystem. And that's obviously really, exciting. And like I said, actually, no strings attached.

Yeah, so I think you were referring to the trial of the Pirate Bay people there In Sweden, right? lucky enough to meet a couple of them in Denmark and it's been very fun to hear about their journey and, yeah, like

Knut: and there, there's, there was a great documentary made about it called TPBAFK. So the Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard, about that whole trial and how, corrupt the system was even back then. And, throwing people in jail for providing links. they didn't do any more wrong than Google did, from a certain perspective.

And, I remember even, before BitTorrents, there was a program called. DC or Direct Connect Do you remember that?

Mathias: I used to, it was one of my first introductions to decentralization. it as you just shared your, like a Google Drive for everyone or something. Like you just shared parts of your file tree to everyone who wanted to peek into it, Yeah, anyway. Oh, that's good that you didn't know you were going with that. it interesting what you said, because I think it's interesting to think that I think to a large degree, the whole decentralization movement that was happening with BitTorrent back in the day got shut down because At some point, authorities figured out that they could just block DNS requests to shut it down for normal people, and as soon as they did that, it was actually effective.

And to Paolo's point, no matter how weak it is, they're done. and they tried to kill the technology elsewhere, but that's actually what killed them. Then, obviously, alternatives came that people could pay for, and it also shows that people actually want, to stay on the right side of things.

I think, now it's going very much in the wrong direction again, because now we're back at abusing that centralization again. the cycle will repeat. But, yeah, like any point of weakness will be attacked at any point.

Decentralization vs. Centralization

Luke: So what are the drawbacks to decentralization? I think we and our audience certainly understand the benefit of decentralization, what you gain by decentralizing, but what do you naturally give up in terms of the user experience and the convenience factor?

Mathias: yeah, I'm sure Paola has stuff to say here, but I'm just, I love talking about this stuff, so I'll go first. Mattias.

I think it's a really interesting question, first of all, because it's one of those questions where You know, obviously I want to say there's no drawbacks, but like anything, it's a balance, right?

Because it's not that there's drawbacks and advantages, there obviously is, but it's also just a different paradigm. first of all, with sensitization, I think one of the biggest thing I noticed also with developers is that we all come out of systems, education systems. That teaches how to think centralized, which makes us biased towards centralized solutions.

and that's, I remember my whole curriculum was about servers and clients and stuff like that. it's actually really hard to think about decentralization as a developer. And I think that's actually part of why a lot of people think it's hard. It's complex because it is complex, but also because we're just like, we've been trained massively in the other direction, and it's really hard to go back because decentralization can be as simple as what Knut said about DC Connect, DC where it's just, oh, I'm just browsing other people's computers.

That's amazing. That's a really, simple experience, and it's like something you can never do But like in today's world, people, the first thing I always get asked is like, how do I get a username? And I'm like, usernames have an inherent centralization and there's trade offs there.

And we need to think that through and stuff. and most applications don't necessarily require usernames. I'm not saying that's a bad feature, but it's that's where you need to think more about the trade offs because there's governance involved to some degree. But for the core experience, and I think that's what we've shown in Keith so far.

Then, there's obviously tons of upsides also, it's much easier to do big data transfers. Money is less of a concern, which actually changes the thinking, how you think about features.

And that, again, is something we've been trained in a lot as developers, because we think centralized. When we talk about features at Holepunch, hey, we should add podcast recording to Keed. Normally somebody would say, that's going to cost a lot of money to host that data. And we just always we don't even have that discussion because it doesn't matter because it's just between the users.

And then it's more about like the UX. But then other simple, like I said, other simple discussions, let's add a username index. That's where we're like, okay, let's think that through because there's like various things to think about there because there's no centric governance, and we don't want to introduce that because again, one point is.

It's bad. so it's, more like you really need to think differently and it's really hard to wire your brain to think differently. but once you get past that point, I think it's, super interesting. And I, think actually developers care way more than normal people because, developers care a lot about how links look and links and structure and that.

And normal people are just used to just clicking buttons and apps and going with the flow on that. And that's also what we're seeing, I think, with, a lot of key

Paolo: I think the hiring has proven a little bit more challenging, as Matthias was saying, when you are told that the cloud is your friend, hosting, on, Google Cloud or AWS is the right thing to do. And, of course, it got cheaper and cheaper, so now everyone can host their websites.

But the reality is that 70 percent of, the entire internet knowledge is hosted in the data centers of three companies. developers should think about that, should think about the fact that internet was born to be point to point and peer to peer. And, we are very far away from that initial concept.

over the years, especially with the boom in, in the year 2000 for the internet boom, and bubble, then, realized that, holding people's data is the way to go, with social media and social network. That is even worse. And so you have these friendly advertisements that are telling you, That, with a smiley face that, you know, yeah, you should, upload all your data on, Apple cloud or Google cloud.

And in general, cloud backups are great, right? You want to have some sort of redundancy in your life, but the reality is that you should be able to upload those. In an encrypted way, and yet most of this data sits unencrypted because, the big tech companies have to decrypt it and use it for, to milk the information to pay for, for, another month of their new data centers.

the, issue is, we have so much power in our hands through our phones. the phones that we have today are much more powerful than the phones that we, or even the computers that we have 10 years ago or 5 years ago. And so We should, we are at a stage where we can use this hardware, not only for communicating, but also for in the future for AI processing and inference and so on.

is, we need to, understand that the word cannot be connected to Google. I mean we cannot be a function of Google. We cannot be a function of AWS. And so I think that, there is, escalating pace of, towards centralization and it's almost a black hole.

And eventually, the, we'll attract all the lights and if we are too close to it, no lights will come out anymore. And, that's why we want to really to double down on this technology, because it's not going to be easy, right? It's going to be very challenging, and most of the people don't care, as Maite has said before.

Most of the people will think, everything works with WhatsApp and, Signal, but Signal announced that their 2023 costs for data centers and data center costs are around 50 million, and they, apart from the mobile coin that was not The best thing that they could do, there is, it's not easy for them to monetize.

And the problem is that if you are, you're basically almost the only way to monetize it is to sell your customer's data. So if you don't want to sell your customer data, eventually your service will not be sustainable. So the only way to make it sustainable is actually going back to peer, where you can leverage people, infrastructure, people, connectivity, people, phones, people, processing power, Deliver very high quality communication system.

And when they will care, it will be probably usually too late if nothing exists yet. when people will care is because shit is hitting the fan. And, you really want to have a solution that is not, that will survive if, the countries around you or around the country where you live are not going to be nice to your own country.

So that's the view to peer-to-peer. The peer-to-peer wheel system will keep working if your neighbor countries are not going to be nice towards you. That's independence, that's resiliency, those are terms that, we need to take very seriously, especially seeing where the, world is going to.

Knut: Yeah, I think we're all primed for, centralized solutions, from a very young age. this is the state, this is what it is like, state funded schooling. state funders or state subsidized media. We are, like brainwashed into, trusting, institutions all our lives.

So I think that is somewhat connected to why people are so reluctant to be vigilant about this on the internet. I think the two go hand in hand that we, take the comfortable way, or most people take the comfortable route of, not taking responsibility for their own stuff. not only on the internet, but outsourcing responsibility to the government is basically the, another side of the same coin, right?

Mathias: I also find it very interesting, especially being from a small country like Denmark that doesn't have a lot of homegrown infrastructure. And I'm just seeing how much communication with some of the public entities is happening through centralized platforms like Facebook and things like that, where even though we centralize it, we also centralize it in companies that we don't even have any control over in different countries where we probably have, no rights at all.

So it's like hyper centralization, especially from the weakest point of view. And I think that's super problematic. And I'm always. Thinking it's, weird that we're not talking about that more especially when you look at the things that they're trying to do in the EU, they're almost trying to just push more in that direction, which I find even more interesting.

yeah, definitely. it's, a huge problem and it's only getting bigger. And that's, why

Challenges and Future of Decentralization

Luke: So to what level can decentralization actually get there? What is the limit to decentralization? And I'll calibrate this with an example. The internet itself, you said it was built to essentially originally be decentralized, but we don't have it. For physical links, like individual physical links between each other, the fiber or whatever the wire is goes together into another group of wires, which eventually go into some backbone, which is operated by a company.

And then that goes into the global Internet. And so somewhere it centralizes into telecom companies and other services. It might be decentralized on one level, but there is a layer of centralized services that make the internet work that isn't necessarily the so called cloud providers and that sort of thing.

So is there a limitation to how far this can go?

Paolo: I think the, in general, sure, there are the ISPs and, their physical infrastructure is in part centralized, but also you start having redundancy, right? So for example, the backbones are redundant. There are multiple companies running, cross connects across different areas of the world.

Now you have Starlink if you want. that is a great way to start decentralizing connectivity because Starlink will not be the only one that will run satellites, so there will be multiple companies that will allow you to connect through satellites, plus you have normal cabling.

So you will have, it will become a huge mesh network, it's already in part, but it will become more and more a huge mesh network. in general, you will always find a way, even with a pigeon, to start sending bits out of your house.

I think the most important part is, you have to be in control of your own data, and then, you need to send this data with the shortest path to the people that you want to talk to. Right now, I usually make this example, because I think it's When we do this presentation, we try to make people think about how much waste also centralized systems have created.

imagine you live in Rome, you live in Rome and you have your family. Most people live nearby their families. That is a classic thing among humans. 90 percent of the people live nearby their families. Maybe nearby, like 10km, 50km nearby. If you talk to your family, every single message, every single photo that you will send to your family, that message will travel, instead of going 50 kilometers in a nearby town where your mother lives or your father lives, it will travel every single message, every single bit of every single video call or every single bit of every photo will travel 5, 000 miles to Frankfurt just to go back 50 kilometers from you.

Imagine how much government spent in order to create these internet lines and to empower them to make it bigger, more, with more capacity Peer to peer allows with a lower latency, allows to save on bandwidth, allows to save on cost of global infrastructure.

So that's how, actually, We can create better mesh networks, more resilient mesh networks, just because data will always find the shortest path from one point to another.

And still all roads lead to Rome. I'm Italian, so I need to use Rome as an example.

Knut: Yeah.

Mathias: I think the discussion here is really interesting compared to Bitcoin, because it's actually the scaling longer term. Sovereignty, like how, Bitcoin kind of told us very direct terms that if you have a key pair, you have your money.

And it doesn't matter where you are in the world. If you have that key pair, you have a way to get to that money. the means of transportation, it's actually very uninteresting in that sense, because you have it with you. The Internet today, the centralized Internet is designed in a way where, what does it mean to go to Facebook?

it's really hard to explain because it's like some certificate that issued by somebody, and there's. Some, cabal of companies that manages them, there's some regulations around it, but we don't really actually understand it that well as normal people. Technically, we can understand it, but it's very, centralized and it's very, opaque and it's built into the infrastructure in that way, in a bad way.

And, with Pure Technology, we're taking the same approach as Bitcoin here and saying, You're just a key pair, and the other person is just a key pair, and there's a bunch of protocols around that, but the transportation is actually not that interesting. Right now, we use the internet to do it.

We'll probably do that for a long time, but there's no reason why we can take the same technology we have right now and in 50 years run it on, laser beams or something else, because we're taking the software and feedback.

Bitcoin and Holepunch: Drawing Parallels

Mathias: I think, that's the main thing to think about in that. Discussion.

Luke: when, Paolo, when you were talking about that people don't care, when you were saying that people don't care because WhatsApp just works, I was at the same time thinking that's the parallel of people saying that, I don't care because Visa just works, right? And so the parallel between Bitcoin and what you're doing at Holepunch, Keet, everything else here, really seems to be tracking along the same line.

And I guess there's the connection that, I won't say all, but a lot of the people involved are already in the Bitcoin ecosystem. But can you comment on is there a little more of a connection there between Holepunch and Keet and Bitcoin?

Paolo: Yeah, Bitcoin definitely is working and servicing, I think, in a good way, many, people in communities. The users of Bitcoin today are, unfortunately, and also that relates to Tether, mostly, in the Western world, in the richer countries, as a way to save wealth and, as a store of value, more than a means of exchange.

For different reasons, right? We'd like a network that would improve, of course, over time, and there will be different approaches, but, still, the world is not yet using Bitcoin, but the world will use Bitcoin when shit will hit the fan. but the beauty of Bitcoin is that an option is already there, is available, and when something bad will happen, people immediately, with a snap of a finger, will turn to Bitcoin, and will have it and can use it. don't have that in communications. What is our communica our parallel with communications, if we don't have it? I don't know, because if, if suddenly centralized communications will, be blocked, then, or privacy in communications will be blocked, and you cannot, you cannot use Whatsapp, or Whatsapp has to start giving all the information to every single government.

and the government will become more evil than what they are today, also western governments then. don't, we wanted to build the exact parallel as we said it, we just tried to describe it, that with Bitcoin, for communications. We need to have something that, since there are so many alternatives that are working as with your, you can make the parallel with Visa, right?

Visa is working today, so people are still using a lot of Visa, but if something will happen, they will use Bitcoin from one day to another. Whatsapp is working, and Zoom is working, and Google Meet is working, so people don't feel the urge, but there will be a trigger point when people will feel the urge at some point in their lives, because something happened around them, and we need to make sure that kit will be available to them.

and will be an option, will be stable, will be well designed so that when they will need it the most that option will be available to them.

Luke: Yeah, fantastic.

The Future of Decentralized Communication

Luke: And so I think the follow up I have, and just to get back to the earlier discussion a little bit with Nostr, the communication in terms of messaging, I absolutely see that and directly in what Keet is, I already absolutely see that. Is there a goal to get somewhere towards more like Social media, social networking, things like that in a, in certainly a decentralized way, but right now there isn't something like that as I understand it, coming from, Keet.

So is, that a goal? Is that on the roadmap?

Paolo: Yeah, it is on the roadmap, it's something that, so we had to start with the thing that we thought was more urgent and also the thing that could have been, would have been a game changer. social media is very important, especially In difficult situation, you want to get news, and you want to get unbiased news, so you want to use, social networks to see what's happening in the world.

But we, think that the most sacrosanct thing that you need in your life is to be able to talk to your family and friends in any situation with the highest privacy possible. that's the first thing that we tackled, and also was a way to battle test the technology with, KIT you can do high quality video calls as well, so if we are able to tackle in the best way possible privacy and extreme scalability of peer to peer communications, then on top of that foundation we can build also social media and every single other application that we have in mind.

Mathias: But first, we wanted to tackle the hardest problem. No, I think it makes a lot of sense. And I also just want to say, as a, probably like one of the most prolific KEET users, I use KEET right now also as a very, like a social media, we have big public rooms where we talk about KEET and talk about technology. I get a lot of the value I would get otherwise on Twitter X from that because I, it's like a public platform for me to, get ideas out there, but also interact with users directly.

And I think, there's many ways to take them as a young app. And we're talking about this a lot, obviously it has to be simple, has to be parent approved. My parents can figure it out, but I think, to a large degree, all really healthy social networks that are actually, to some degree, a communication app.

And it's also just a really good way to get local news and to get this locality that Peter is good at. That doesn't mean that we might not also make other things, but I think it's a hard line to set the difference between a social network and a communications app when it's structured correctly,

Interoperability and User Experience

Luke: Yeah, and this, another thing that came to mind just as, you were talking about these parallels, as, I understand it, the account system with Keet is, essentially still just a, Key pair. Correct me if I'm, wrong,

Mathias: Very, true.

Luke: you backups with the same 1224 words.

Is, that fully interoperable as well? Is that, could be your Bitcoin key. That could be

Mathias: We use the, same, I can't remember the date, the BIP, but there's a BIP for like during key generation. So we can use it also in the future for other things. and you have those words, you have your account, and that's, we never store that. And that's like your sovereignty and, no, I was just going to say that lets you use it seamlessly on different devices also. It's one of those things that I love because I know what's going on when you use keyed Insanely hard problem, but it's solved by the runtime, and it just works seamlessly and I think that's, the beauty of it.

Paolo: I think there's some UX stuff to figure out about onboarding that stuff a little bit easier for normal people. That's probably to a large degree the same for Bitcoin. The other part that I would do with Bitcoin is that, with Bitcoin, with your 12, 24 words, you can access your private wealth. the beauty of Bitcoin is that you can remember 12 24 words, you cross borders, and you carry with you your wealth. You can do the same thing with your digital private life.

You remember 12 24 words, they could be the same by the way. whatever happens, you can spawn back your digital private life fully encrypted from, one of your other devices that you connected that is somewhere else in the world. So when you start seeing and understanding the unlock in terms of also human resilience that this creates is very, insane and can create a very powerful, that can be used for, to create a very, powerful applications, not just communications, but you can build.

Really any sort of interaction, even mapping. Imagine peer to peer mapping, where basically data is not stored in one single location. You can access, tiles of the maps, from, local people that curate them in a better way. So the, level of applications that you can build, All unlocked by the same technology that is being used by Bitcoin is very, incredible.

Luke: Yes, absolutely it is. And what do you think of the idea that all of this stuff is just interoperable now based on essentially you have your private key and there you go. It doesn't matter the technology stack. Is that sort of an agnostic thing where you can take your data to any one of these systems?

What you're building with Keith being one, Nostr being another, Bitcoin being a third, what do you think of that?

Paolo: Yeah, the fact that, data is yours, right? So you should do whatever you want with your data. That is, I think, an axiom that we should assume. And, it shouldn't even, we shouldn't even discuss about this, right? We are discussing about it because people are trying to take away this axiom from us.

The, you are a key pair, and you're basically, unique, and uniqueness is expressed by the cryptography around those 24 words, and that's, that also is a way to prove your identity, it's a mathematical way to prove your identity.

No one can steal that from you, of course, but no one can track it as no one can impersonate, should not be able to impersonate you. So it's truly powerful.

Mathias: also think it's like worth remembering here also in this discussion that a lot of very high valuable data for yourself is actually not that big, but centralized platforms take it hostage anyway. if you take all my chat history and, I have pictures, but like a couple of the pictures would probably be bigger than all my chat history ever.

but a lot of that, those messages have a lot of value for me, especially personally and also being able to search through it and have infinite history, it's very valuable for me personally. But it's very scary for me if that's on some other platform where it gets leaked at some point, et cetera, et cetera.

But we already have the devices, just normal consumer devices that we buy, that we all have, phones, computers, whatever, that have more than enough capacity to store multiple copies of this. In terms of like per user, data production, it's a manageable problem.

And I think it's interesting how, providers force us to think in terms of giving that data away, even though we could easily store it.

Paolo: And this is even more important when we think about potential, AI applications, right? So imagine your best assistant. Paolo's assistant should go through all my emails, my kids chats, my old social stuff, and be able to be my best assistant. But in order to do that, I have two options.

Either, I imagine that OpenAI would come with an assistant. They would upload, All the information on their servers, crunch that information, and then, use it to serve, me, but also service their own needs. And that can become very scary, also because they wear a hat. It's public, right?

you don't want your most intimate codes that your best personal assistant could know, to be on somewhere else, rather than your devices. And so people were, people never uploaded, at least most of the people would never upload medical, information on Facebook, right? But they are uploading it on ChatGPT to get a second opinion.

so things can be, get even scarier than what we described today because, we, discussed about social media, that is basically, the fun part where we upload photos, But, things can become scarier when it comes to privacy and data control with ai.

So I want to see a future where I have a local AI that can read all key messages that I have from my local phone on my local device, and can become the best powers assistant possible without renouncing to my privacy, and also still governed by the same 24 words. the fine tuning that is applied on that LLM should stay local to my own device, and it should be in control of that.

And still, the current power of the devices that we have makes it possible. We should not fall for the same lie. We don't need, of course, big data centers with GPUs are important for training a huge LLM, but that is a generic LLM. You can take that one and then fine tune it with your own data and run it by yourself.

And for most of it, unless you want to do crazy things, that is more than enough and can run on modern GPUs or local GPUs or your phones. We should start thinking that we can build local experiences without having an API all the time connected to someone else's data center.

Knut: Yeah.

The Role of Tether in the Crypto Ecosystem

Knut: It's super interesting. you briefly just briefly mentioned tether before and I think we need to get into this. what is it and how much of a maxi are you, Paolo?

And, what, made this thing happen? Can you give us the story here about Tether?

Tether's Origin and Evolution

Paolo: Tether started in 2014. I consider myself a maxi, but running Tether, you could say that, I'm a shit coiner. I don't mind, right? I like what I do, and I think I'm net positive, so it's okay. Tera was born in 2014 with a very simple idea. there were a few crypto exchanges in, 2014.

it was Bitfinex, Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp. OKCoin, there was BTCChina, and just a few others, right? Around 10 that were meaningful. The problem back then was to do, trading arbitrage, you sell Bitcoin on the exchange where the price is higher, you take the dollars. From that sale, you move the dollars on the exchange where the price is lower and rinse and repeat.

That is called arbitrage. It is a property of every single efficient financial system. And that also helps to keep the price of Bitcoin in line across different exchanges. But, that was very, hard in 2014. If you remember in 2013 was the first year that Bitcoin broke the 1, 000.

But on some exchanges the price was 1. 2, on others was 900. in order to arbitrage that price difference, you have to move dollars from one exchange to another and Bitcoin from one exchange to another. You can move Bitcoin from one exchange to another. 10 minutes, but dollars would take days, right?

International wires. And so of course the opportunity arbitrage was, fully gone by, the, time the wire was hitting the, receiving exchange. the reason why we created that was, USDT was simply to put the dollar on a blockchain so that we could have the same user experience that we had with bitcoin.

For the first two years, almost no exchange apart Bitfinex understood USDT. Then Poloniex in 2016 started to add the USDT across for against every single trading pair. There was the start of the ICO boom. 2017 was the peak of the ICO boom and, USDT reached 1 billion in market cap. Fast forward in 2020, we had around 10 billion in market cap, and then the bull run started, but also another important thing started, that was the pandemic.

USDT's Impact on Emerging Markets

Paolo: So the pandemic had a huge effect on many economies around the world, in all the economies around the world, but especially in emerging markets, developing countries.

Basically pandemic also killed entire economies. And so as a Bitcoin you would think, oh, all these people that are in countries like Argentina and Venezuela and Turkey and so on, they should use Bitcoin and they should, they should, only use Bitcoin because everything else is cheap.

So that is pretty much, the approach that we have as Bitcoiners that, I believe in. But the problem is that. Not everyone is ready, so not everyone has our time to understand Bitcoin. Not everyone has yet the full skill set to understand Bitcoin at this stage, at this moment in time.

we as Bitcoiners didn't build the best user experience in the world, right? So one of the best wallets for Bitcoin is still Electrum. That, is not necessarily nice and well done for and simple to be used for, a 70 year old lady. so we need to do a better job as Bitcoiners to build better user experiences we want Bitcoin to be more used around the world.

At the same time, 99 percent of the population knows, especially the ones that are living in high inflation areas, knows that there is the dollar that is usually Much better currency than what they hold in their hands. the US dollar is not, definitely not perfect. It's not the perfect fiat currency. but it's like the tale of the two friends running away from the lion, right?

you have, one friend tells to the other, Oh, the lion is gonna kill us. We have to run really fast. And one of the two friends says to the other, I just have to run faster than you, right? So the US dollar is the friend that is running faster, in a sense that is the one that is likely better than the others.

And so being better than the others is creating a sort of safety feeling among 5 billion people in the world that live in high inflation countries. And for those people that, they don't have yet the time, they didn't have the luck also, maybe, to understand Bitcoin, they are, in fact, using USDT.

If you live in Argentina, peso lost 98% against the US dollar in the last five years. The Turkish L lost 80% against the US dollar in, the last five years. So of course, Bitcoin would be better than the US dollar, but even already, if you hold the dollar, you are the king of the hill there, right?

So because it's, you are able to preserve your wealth much, better than almost anyone else in the region. I think, USDT is offering a temporary solution and is providing a service, a very good service to people that don't have alternatives and good alternatives and they are very, familiar with the U.

S. dollar already. so eventually, the hyperbitcoinization, I think it will happen. there is no way it won't happen. It's hard to pinpoint on a time when, that will happen. But it's all about the turning point. What the economy will look like in the next, 10, 20 years and what trigger point there will be for fiat currencies to blow up and become irrelevant.

Bitcoin as a Savings Account

Paolo: the way I see it is that it's likely that the U. S. dollar will stay around for a while, and people might still want to use, the U. S. dollar as a checking account, but they, should start to use, Bitcoin as their savings account, in the checking account, you, are happy to not make interest, It's something that you use for payments, it's something that you are okay to detach from because it's the money that you are ready to spend.

The savings account is the thing that we should fight for. This thing is the thing that matter the most, and, it's the thing that will is protecting people wealth. And so in the long term. And in the medium term, we should push for this savings account to be Bitcoin. also with Tether, we are heavily investing in companies, in Bitcoin companies.

we support the Blockstream. We supported so many in the space that are, we, are supporting RGB. That is a protocol that is building, assets on top of, like network, style channels. Thank you for listening. and we buy Bitcoin ourselves. We do a lot of Bitcoin mining.

We develop, I think, the best and most sophisticated Bitcoin mining software, by the way, based on hole punch technology. It's like IoT for Bitcoiners and Bitcoin mining. It's very cool. we are relying on the dollar and, you could say that USDT is helping the dollar, expansion, but the same way I don't think Dollar and Bitcoin aren't necessarily opposed to one or the other.

I think that Bitcoin has its own path. And no matter what happens, there is no way to slow it down. I think, it's going to be inevitable success. It's going to be inevitable that it will become global internet money and global words money. No country will trust to each other with, with each other currencies for, for a longer time, and so the only viable solution is a currency that is governed by math.

That is the only objective way, objective thing that we have in the universe. that's my train of thoughts on, Tether and Bitcoin.

Knut: Oh, thank you. Thank you for that explanation. It explains a lot of things. To me, it sounds a bit like you're a lubrication company, like selling lubrication for the transition between the rape of the dollar to the love fest of the hyperbitcoinized world, to make the transition a little smoother.

Paolo: we are more than, at Tether we have also this educational arm and, believe it or not, the majority of the creation we do is actually on Bitcoin, right? So we are supporting the Plan B network led by the great Giacomo Zucco. The unfortunate thing is that USDT, didn't have a marketing team up to, 2022 with Tether.

So basically, I wish I could say that success of Tether is because we were super intelligent and great. but actually the success of Tether, unfortunately is a symptom of the success of, of, national economies. And it's sad if you think about it, right? So the success of your main product U as it is, They're actually proportional to the FACAP of many central banks. And, but it is what it is, right? So we need to do what we do at, really, at DataRace, creating all these educational contents to try to explain that, sure, we are providing a tool for today, but, For tomorrow you probably need, you need to understand that you have other options, you need to understand Bitcoin, because as we said for, Keith, right?

So the moment when you will need the most Bitcoin, it has to be available, you need to understand it, so that is a true option for you. The way we, see bitcoin education.

Knut: No, and, something like Tether would have, emerged, either way, and it's very comforting to know that it's run by Bitcoiners and not by a central bank itself or something. yeah, and the Plan B Network, I was a guest lecturer there in Logano and it was fantastic.

I love what you're doing there with the educational hub. And we even got Giacomo to write the foreword to our new book here that you can see here behind Luke.

Luke: Always say the title, Knut. Always say the title.

Knut: Bitcoin, the inverse of Clown World. It's, you, if, you're good at maths and emojis, you might be able to figure out the title from the cover, but it's one divided by Clown World anyway, which is on the opposite side of the everything divided by 21 million equation, So anyway, looking forward to seeing you in Lugano and giving you both a copy of the book, of course.

Paolo: Oh, with pleasure, with great pleasure, with a nice, education.

Luke: Absolutely. Yep.

Plan B Forum and Future Events

Luke: 100%. And we have to wind things down, but I'll just say as well, yeah, absolutely looking forward to Lugano Plan B Forum. Always a highlight of the year. It was my first time last year. I absolutely loved it. can't wait to attend this year.

so it's the 25th, 2020 6th of October, 2024. this year, it's a Bitcoin event that is not made to make money. So the problem with events is that. You have to find sponsors, and usually, sponsor might not be well aligned with the message you want to give, right? I think Tether is lucky enough, to not have to make money on the event.

Paolo: I want to have, good, guests. I want to have great speakers. I want to have the messaging. That is not only about Bitcoin, it's about, freedom of speech as well. We had the family of Assange for the last few years, and I think that they will come also this year.

I'm going to be probably killed by the By our marketing team, I'm not sure if they announced it, but we are going to have another Plan B event also in El Salvador next year, so we're trying to create this network of cities and countries that have things in common and, invite people that want to share knowledge around the world.

And, yeah, and of course we, are very proud of the good food that we, serve in Lugano. So that is another thing that, not all the bands can say the same thing.

Knut: No, it's fantastic. And we happened to bump into the Assange family at the cocktail bar in a fancy hotel and, had a very interesting conversation with them there. So if you're listening. Anyone from the Assange family is welcome on the show any time. So yeah, no looking forward to that event for sure, we had a great time.

And I think we're even playing this year, aren't we, Luke?

Paolo: You're

Luke: yeah, the Satoshi Rakamoto is in the event there, we, played, back in Prague, it was my first, time, but Knut is a regular at the Rakamotos.

Yeah, we played at Lugano last year Oh, anything and everything, what did we do in Prague?

Knut: paranoid and,

Paolo: Can I commission a

Knut: What song would you like to hear?

Paolo: I have two that I would suggest. One is Nothing Else Matters.

Knut: Alright.

Paolo: So I think that, is very inspiring, right?

Knut: Bitcoin, for sure.

Nothing Else Matters. it's perfectly aligned with Bitcoin. And, the other one is Sad But True. Oh, that would be fun. We'll squeeze in some Metallica there, won't we, Luke?

Mathias: we'll 100% have those songs ready to go. We also have, a big peer to peer track at the conference,

Knut: Yeah.

Mathias: not so much music, but yeah, that's peer to

Knut: Nothing else matters.

Luke: looking forward to that.

Knut: Sorry, brain fart. Sad but true is about the dollar still being around,

Paolo: Yeah, you can say that.

Luke: Okay.

Final Thoughts and Closing Remarks

Luke: Hey, we have to wind things down here because, we're, almost, out of time. So I'll just hand this, back to you both. Is there anything else you'd like to, mention about, your plans in the upcoming couple of years, in, key, toll, punch, anything like that?

Mathias: only that we're, like I said, we're integrating really hard right now, and it's a really fun time to, join the company because, we're small and efficient We get to work with Tether, which has a lot of benefits and it's getting really fast, so definitely check that out. And it's also a really fun time to join Keith in our public rooms.

There's a lot of very personal, in a good way, intense chats where you get to be part of the loop. I love to be part of those early communities and I would suggest everybody to check that out and go to the website and try it out.

Paolo: we will certainly do that. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So go check out Keith and Holepunch and the Plan B forum in Lugano, You could visit tether. io, that is, the website where we are trying to explain what we have in our minds between, finance, bitcoin mining, energy production, AI, communications, brain chips and stuff, right? I think it's more exciting.

Mathias: Just those things, that's all.

Paolo: Yeah, we can piss off more than this. Thanks.

Mathias: a

Luke: No, It's just perfect. and is on that note, is there anywhere else specific you'd like to direct our listeners?

Paolo: just follow the social channels and give us feedback on kit all the time because these technologies, needs everyone's help to be nailed them.

Mathias: We love technical feedback. We love UX feedback. We're trying to make something that works for the masses, so anything is good.

Luke: So that's, all at Keet. Is that correct? For Keet?

Mathias: Key. io and pairs. com for our runtime. It's all peer to peer.

Knut: Alright,

Mathias: Wonderful. And you're also still on the legacy social media platforms, right? Yeah.

Knut: we'll make sure to include links to your handles so people can find you there if they would like. forward to seeing you in Lugano.

Paolo: Likewise, I

Knut: But yeah, worth saying again.

Paolo: Thank you for having an invitation.

Luke: Yes, we'll wrap things up here. This has been the Bitcoin Infinity Show.

@ 8cb60e21:5f2deaea

@ 5d4b6c8d:8a1c1ee3

It was great having football back. The 49ers and Chiefs continue to dominate, the Raiders, Jets, and Donkeys continue to disappoint.

I only made two picks last week. The Raiders money line was a dud, but my parlay of the Steelers money line with the under was a big hit. Unfortunately, freebitcoin hasn't put any NFL games up, yet. Hopefully they get around to it at some point.

I really like this type of parlay. The house treats outcomes as though they're independent, but I don't think that makes sense. In the event of a Steelers' win, the under was far more likely than the over, because their offense stinks and the game was likely a defensive slog.

In line with that thinking, I made two parlays this week: 1. Raiders money line with the under (7:1): yes, I'm going back to the Raiders. They're probably going to lose, but if they win, it will be because of awesome defense. 2. Bengals money line with the over (4.5:1): Maybe Joe Burrow stinks this season, but maybe the Bengals had been looking ahead to KC. The Chiefs offense is phenomenal again, so the Bengals are only likely to win if this turns into a shootout.

Are there any odds you're excited about (doesn't have to be football)?

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/679894

@ 655a7cf1:d0510794

Currently have kyc BTC, huge fan of lightning Network. Because I am a constant user of lightning. Plan on doing my business with lightning as well , peer-to-peer I'm not sure if I'm so worried about kyc I might be misguided in this situation.

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/679520

@ e83b66a8:b0526c2b

If you’re thinking of buying a Bitaxe, here is some information about pools vs solo mining.

Firstly, although the terms are clear “pool mining”, “solo mining” there is nuance in these definitions, so I want to explain these terms fully.

Solo mining pools exist, such as: https://solo.ckpool.org/

It is called a pool, because you are using their credentials to mine, but you keep all the rewards if you win a block. Despite the name, this is not a pool.

You then have a pool such as https://ocean.xyz/ who are a pool, you use their credentials to mine, and you earn a share of their income relative to your contribution in hash power.

There has been some publicity about a solo miner winning a pool recently, there were about 12 blocks won in 2023 by solo miners. However a winning solo miner is likely to be a server farm with hundreds or even thousands of S19’s or S21’s sharing the same payout wallet address. The image of a home miner with a Bitaxe winning a block is extremely unlikely.

A solo miner is defined as a group of miners that share a payout wallet address, so for example you could have 10 Bitaxe’s at home all configured with the same BTC wallet address, this is considered a single solo miner. And so it is with mid tier mining farms, often privately owned, who have a number of machines set to the same payout address. Most of the time, they share earnings for a more reliable income, but the owner may decide to gamble on winning a block and so choose to solo (lottery) mine.

So far, my Bitaxe, which has been running for 4 days now and is part of the Ocean pool. It is earning about 50 Sats a day. If I were to wait for an on-chain payout, it would take around 60 years to receive one. I can, however, setup a BOLT12 lightning payout address and earn this tiny income through Lightning.

So here’s my recommendation.

Currently, there are two pools that control more than 50% of mining, Foundry USA and AntPool. This is a dangerous position and in fact Bitmain, who provide around 90% of all mining hardware actually invest and have stakes in these and several other pools. This is centralising mining and could potentially allow a 51% attack, which could compromise Bitcoin.

Jack Dorsey is currently developing competing mining hardware chipset, through his company Block and Ocean are attempting to decentralise the pools by building a truly independent option for miners to join.

If you buy a Bitaxe, the best way you can help alleviate the dominance of Bitmain is to join a true pool like Ocean to slowly move control away from the dominant pools.

Bear in mind that many of the other smaller pools are still controlled by Bitmain.

If you're still interested in lottery mining, here are your chances of winning a block:

Represented as Hash rates of different miners:

Nerdminer: 20 KH/s = 20,000 H/s

Bitaxe: 750 GH/s = 750,000,000,000 H/s

Bitmain Antminer S9: 13.5 TH/s = 13,500,000,000,000 H/s

Bitmain Antminer S19: 110TH/s = 110,000,000,000,000 H/s

Bitmain Antminer S21: 200TH/s = 200,000,000,000,000 H/s

Current Global Hash rate 628EH/s (Sept 2024) = 628,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

If you're running a Bitaxe, your percentage chance of winning a block is:

0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000119426751592357%

Over a year, your chances increase to: 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000627707006369428%

Your chances of winning the UK national lottery (assuming 20M tickets sold and you buy one):

0.000005%

Over a year, your chances increase to: 0.00026%

Like in all things in Bitcoin, I don’t ask you to trust me. If you want to verify, here are the references I used in making my conclusions:

https://protos.com/chart-when-solo-miners-found-a-bitcoin-block/

https://investors.block.xyz/investor-news/news-details/2024/Blocks-New-Bitcoin-Mining-Chip-to-Be-Part-of-an-Ongoing-Project-With-Core-Scientific-to-Decentralize-Mining-Hardware/default.aspx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo91DWvZRs8

https://i.nostr.build/9rQ9Plv6XQYtt6xd.jpg

@ 6ad3e2a3:c90b7740

While I love traveling and usually feel enriched by the experience, I dread and detest the process of going to the airport and getting on a plane. It’s not that I’m afraid of flying — though a plane crash would be one of the worst ways to die — but that the airlines and airports have made the experience as inefficient, dehumanizing and cumbersome as possible. While in the short-term these measures might have generated some extra revenue, cut costs or staved off encroachment from competitors, long-term it cannot be good for the service you offer to be so universally reviled. In the interest of improving their product — and the experience of millions of future passengers including me — here are some practical suggestions:

1. Separate passengers from their bags as early as possible.

The single stupidest airline policy is that checking a bag costs extra while carry-ons are free. What that does is incentivize everyone to drag their luggage through the airport and onto the plane. This has several negative consequences:

a) Even though most airlines have assigned seats, everyone lines up 10 or 20 minutes before the start of the already too long boarding process, frantically hoping to secure some scarce overhead space rather than relaxing in the terminal and boarding at their leisure before the door closes.

b) The process of people filing into the narrow plane aisle(s) with their bags and taking time to load them into the overheads stalls the entire boarding process. Not only do people stand in line at the boarding gate, but they stand in line in the jet bridge and again in the aisle(s). Whereas boarding with purses, laptops and other small, under-the-seat items might take 10 minutes or so, getting all the luggage in takes half an hour. If there are 150 people aboard, that’s 3,000 minutes (50 hours) of human life squandered on a useless and stressful activity. Multiply that by thousands of flights per day.

c) The process of deplaning is also slow because everyone has to get their bags out of the overhead. That’s another 15-minute process that should take five.

d) Everyone going through security with all their carry-ons slows down the security line significantly and makes people have to arrive at the airport earlier.

e) Because everyone has their bags, they have to lug them around the terminal while using the restroom, eating or shopping for something to read. Having a 20-pound weight on your shoulder only makes the experience that much more miserable.

The solution to this is for airlines to allow free checked bags and charge for carry-ons with the exception of parents traveling with young children.

To make the process of checking bags more efficient and less cumbersome there should be an immediate drop-off outside the airport. Like curb-side check-in, but automated, a giant conveyor belt of sorts where everyone drops their bag that will be sorted appropriately inside. This drop off area would have security keeping an eye on it, but it would be self-serve and connect at all entry points including curb-side, the parking garage, from the train, etc.

There would be no need for bag tags because people could have an airport-certified chip inserted into their luggage that syncs with the traveler’s boarding pass, i.e., the system reads the chip and directs the bag to the proper gate underground. (Maybe there would be a plastic bin at all the drop-off points you into which you put your bag so luggage of different shapes, sizes and materials could move smoothly and reliably on the conveyor belt to its destination.)

Security details would have to be worked out (maybe you’d have to scan your boarding pass or passport at the bag drop to open it), but as it stands, once you drop your bag off at the curb or the check-in area, it’s essentially the same process now, i.e, it has to be scanned internally before being placed on the plane.

2. Eliminate Security Lines

Going through security would be far easier without all the bags, but to expedite and improve it further, we should make two key changes, neither of which should be beyond our capacity to implement.

a) Instead of a single-file conveyor belt scanned by humans, make the conveyor belt wide enough for everyone to put their laptops, belts, etc. on simultaneously. This could easily be done by providing plastic bins (as they do now), but with individual numbers and keys on them, like you’d find in most locker rooms. You’d grab bin 45, for example, pull the key out, put your things in it, lock it, walk through the metal detector, retrieve your bin on the other side, unlock it, get your things, put the key back in it, and it gets returned for re-use.

Instead of a bored-out-of-his-mind human looking at each bag individually, there would be a large scanner that would look at all the bags simultaneously and flag anything suspicious.

b) Just as there’s no reason to send the bags through the scanner single-file, there’s no reason to send the people through that way, either. Instead, install room-wide metal detectors through which dozens of people could walk simultaneously. Any passengers that set it off would be digitally marked by the detector, directed back out, shed the offending item into a numbered bin and collect it on the other side.

Basically, you’d drop anything big off before you even set foot in the building, and you’d drop everything else into a security bin, walk through without waiting and collect it on the other side.

3. Make sure the gates are clean, have enough seats to accommodate the passengers of even the largest planes that come through, ample charging stations and reliable and free wi-fi.

Because you’re no longer forced to line up and hustle for overhead space, you’ll be spending more time sitting comfortably in the terminal.

4. Have clean, efficient public transportation from the center of each city directly to the airport. (Some cities already have this.) Not a train, a bus and a one-mile walk.

There are smaller things airports could do to make the process even better — and I’ll suggest some below — but these three would at least make it tolerable and humane. It would shave off roughly an hour per trip, spare people the burden of schlepping around with heavy bags, wading through slow-moving security lines (which add stress if you’re in danger of missing your flight), standing in the terminal, waiting in line after line to sit in a cramped and uncomfortable seat for 20-30 minutes before the plane even takes off and remaining stuck in that seat 15 minutes after the plane has made it to the gate while people one by one painstakingly get their bags out of the overhead bins. Moreover, people could get to the airport later without rushing, and if they were early, they could relax in the terminal or get work done.

Here are some other suggestions:

1. With fewer people using the overhead bins, rip them out. There would be a few bins at designated spots (just like there are a few emergency exits), but the interior of the plane would feel more spacious and less claustrophobic. You also wouldn’t risk hitting your head when you stood up.
2. Airplanes should have reasonably priced (ideally free) wi-fi and outlets in each row. There’s no way it costs anywhere near the $35 per flight, per person GoGo Inflight absurdly charges.
3. Treat airports as public squares — invest in their design as well as their functionality. Incorporate outdoor spaces, green spaces. Attract decent restaurants, bars, cafes. People unencumbered by bags and not rushing to wait in line to board 40 minutes early will be more able to enjoy the environment and arriving travelers will immediately get a good impression and be put at ease.
4. Do not advertise mileage rewards from credit cards or other sources unless those miles are actually redeemable at a reasonable rate and on routes and times someone would actually fly. As it stands those programs are borderline fraud — you can fly a middle seat one way from NY to LA for 30,000 miles at 6 am, but that’s not why I signed up for the credit card. If mileage plans are too costly, scrap them.

I can anticipate some objections to these ideas, and I’ll address each one in turn.

1. This would cost too much money.

My suggestions would require a significant initial investment, but it would be but a small piece of the infrastructure outlay that’s sorely needed — and on which our current president campaigned — and it would create jobs. Moreover, it would save travelers tens of millions of hours per year. At $15 per hour — it would pay for itself in short order. (And taxpayers’ squandered time and awful experiences are exactly what their tax dollars should go toward remediating.)

2. It’s too much of a security risk.

Airport security is incredibly flawed right now, as tests repeatedly show. You can get prohibited items through security easily already, and it’s likely the screening process is mostly “security theater,” i.e., just for show. But to the extent this is a serious concern, the newer system might actually improve security due to improved technology spurred by the infrastructure investment. Better detection could be designed into the new system, rather than relying on bored-out-of-their-mind humans to scan endlessly through people’s toiletries expecting to find nothing for hours and days on end.

Moreover, airport security has never actually been an issue in the US. Even on 9/11, the flimsy security worked well — the hijackers managed only boxcutters on the tragically ill-fated flights, not guns or bombs. In other words, that was a failure of government intelligence, not one of airline security even when no one took his shoes off or had to worry about how many ounces of liquid was in his shampoo bottle.

3. I like free carry-ons because it saves me from waiting at the baggage claim.

Great, then pay extra for that. When something you like individually causes collective harm, there needs to be a cost for it. That we have the opposite system where people doing what would make everyone else’s experience easier and better have to pay is perverse.

The bottom line — the current state of air travel both in the US and Europe is unacceptable*. We cannot have a system in which everyone participating despises it and simply pretend it’s an inevitable hassle about which we’re powerless to do anything. The central issue is the dehumanizing** lack of respect for travelers’ time and experience. It’s time to change our priorities and take care of the human beings for whom airports and air travel exist.

*I haven’t even touched on the awful state of flights themselves with cramped seats, small, dirty rest rooms, bad food and exorbitant fees to change your itinerary. That’s because I wanted to focus mostly on the airport/government side over which the public has ownership, and fixing the overall economics of air travel is probably more difficult than getting airlines to reverse their checked-bag fee policies.

** This article was written in March of 2017, and little did I know how much more dehumanizing things would get during covid.

@ 6ad3e2a3:c90b7740

I’ll write a separate Week 1 Observations later, but I wanted to dedicate this space solely to mourning my Circa Survivor entry.

Circa Survivor costs $1000 to enter and has a $10M prize for the winner, usually split by several as things get down to the wire. Three years ago, when the prize was $6M Dalton Del Don and I — the first time we ever entered — made it to the final 23 in Week 12. The value of our share was something like $260K at that point, but we got bounced by the Lions who beat the 12-point favored Cardinals and took home nothing.

When you enter a large survivor pool, the overwhelming likelihood is you’ll meet this fate at some point, whether in Week 1 or 12. So it’s not really the loss that’s painful, so much as not getting to live and die each week with a chosen team. You lose your status as “the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” and become just an observer watching and commentating on the games without the overarching purpose of surviving each week.

This year was also different due to the lengths to which I went to sign up. It’s not just the $1000 fee, it’s getting to Vegas in person, the $400 in proxy fees (you need locals to input your picks for you if you don’t live there), the $60 credit card fee, the $200 crappy hotel I booked at the last minute, the flights (one of which was cancelled due to heat), the rental car that necessitated, the gas, getting lost in the desert, the entire odyssey while sick and still jet-lagged in 122-degree heat.

But it’s not about the money, and it’s not even about the herculean effort per se, but the feeling and narrative I crafted around it. I was the guy who got this done. I flew from Portugal to San Francisco for 12 hours, two days later from SF to Palm Springs to help my 87-YO uncle with his affairs, improvised to get from Palm Springs to Vegas, which took six hours due to road closures, signed up for the contests, made the flight back to San Francisco, flew to Denver at 7 am the next day, took my daughter the Rockies game in the afternoon and then on to Boulder the following day. Maybe that’s not so impressive to some of you, but for me, an idle ideas person, a thinker, observer, someone who likes to express himself via a keyboard, it was like Alexander the Great conquering Persia.

And it’s not only about that smaller mission, or the narrative I crafted around it, but a larger one which was to bring sports content to nostr which I vowed to do before the summer which is why I felt I had to make the effort to get to Vegas to sign up for the contests, to have sufficient skin in the game, to have something real about which to write.

And I got the idea to do this seriously because Heather wrote a guide to Lisbon which I posted on nostr, and a few prominent developers there were surprisingly excited about getting that kind of quality content on the protocol. And I thought — if they’re this excited about a (very in-depth) guide to one particular city in Europe, how much more value could I create posting about a hobby shared by 50-odd million Americans? And that thought (and the fact I had to go to Palm Springs anyway) is what set me off on the mission in the first place and got me thinking this would be Team of Destiny, Part 2, only to discover, disappointingly, it’s real destiny was not to make it out of the first week.

. . .

While my overwhelming emotion is one of disappointment, there’s a small element of relief. Survivor is a form of self-inflicted torture that probably subtracts years from one’s life. Every time Rhamondre Stevenson broke the initial tackle yesterday was like someone tightening a vice around my internal organs. There was nothing I could do but watch, and I even thought about turning it off. At one point, I was so enraged, I had to calm down consciously and refuse to get further embittered by events going against me. Mike Gesicki had a TD catch overturned because he didn’t hold the ball to the ground, The next play Tanner Hudson fumbled while running unimpeded to the end zone. I kept posting, “Don’t tilt” after every negative play.

There’s a perverse enjoyment to getting enraged about what’s going on, out of your control, on a TV screen, but when you examine the experience, it really isn’t good or wholesome. I become like a spoiled child, ungrateful for everything, miserable and indignant at myriad injustices and wrongs I’m powerless to prevent.

At one point Sasha came in to tell me she had downloaded some random game from the app store on her Raspberry Pi computer. I had no interest in this as I was living and dying with every play, but I had forced myself to calm down so much already, I actually went into her room to check it out, not a trace of annoyance in my voice or demeanor.

I don’t think she cared about the game, or about showing it to me, but had stayed with her friends most of the weekend and was just using it as an excuse to spend a moment together with her dad. I scratched her back for a couple seconds while standing behind her desk chair. The game was still going on, and even though I was probably going to lose, and I was still sick about it, I was glad to have diverted a moment’s attention from it to Sasha.

. . .

In last week’s Survivor post, I wrote:

What method do I propose to see into the future? Only my imagination. I’m going to spend a lot of time imagining what might happen, turn my brain into a quantum device, break space-time and come to the right answers. Easier said than done, but I’m committed.

It’s possible I did this, but simply retrieved my information from the wrong branch of the multiverse. It happens.

. . .

I picked the Bengals knowing full well the Bills were the correct “pot odds” play which is my usual method. Maybe when the pot-odds are close, I might go with my gut, but they were not especially close this week, and yet I still stuck with Cincinnati because they were the team I trusted more.

And despite it being a bad pick — there are no excuses in Survivor, no matter what happens in the game, if you win it’s good, and lose it’s bad — I don’t feel that badly about it.

I regret it only because I wish I were still alive, but it was my error. I went with what I believed, and it was wrong. That I can live with 100 times better than swapping out my belief for someone else’s and losing. Had I done that I’d be inconsolable.

. . .

I won’t let the Survivor debacle undermine my real mission to bring sports to nostr. Team of Destiny 2 would have been a compelling story, but it was never essential. After all, my flight was cancelled and I had to improvise, so now my Survivor entry is cancelled, and I’ll have to improvise again. The branch of the multiverse where the Bengals won didn’t give me the information I wanted, but maybe it was what I really needed to know. That I am the man in the arena yet, the battle was ever against myself, and for a brief moment, while my team was losing, I prevailed.

@ 129f5189:3a441803

Project 2025, outlined in the Heritage Foundation's "Mandate for Leadership" document, serves as a fundamental guide for the next Republican administration. Despite Trump's extensive denial, in today's material, we will explore the deepening and continuation of many policies already employed during his first term. The idea is that this material will serve as a reference document to consult and verify what was actually implemented and/or followed. https://image.nostr.build/e3b89d71ff929258e5d9cb0b5ca8709a381598f43d8be4b17df3c69c0bc74d4a.jpg This document presents proposals for the foreign policy and the State Department of the United States of America, as well as the strategy with its political partners and adversaries. We will also address the U.S. government's communication strategy abroad. https://image.nostr.build/a4250b786f611b478aaf0be559427ad7d4296fbcacb2acc692c7f0d7eb06b0dd.jpg Reorienting U.S. Foreign Policy: Proposals for a Conservative Future In the chapter "The Department of State" from the "Mandate for Leadership," also known as "Project 2025," Kiron K. Skinner presents a comprehensive plan to reform U.S. foreign policy under a conservative administration. Skinner, a renowned foreign policy expert and former Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, outlines global threats and offers specific recommendations to strengthen the U.S. position on the international stage. Below, we present a detailed analysis of the proposals, emphasizing direct quotes and explanations of the key points discussed. https://image.nostr.build/278dcd7ef0439813ea35d0598319ee347f7a8cd7dfecac93be24ffdd0f6ecd04.jpg History and Structure of the State Department Since its founding in 1789, the State Department has been the primary diplomatic channel of the U.S. With nearly 80,000 employees and 275 posts around the world, it faces significant structural challenges. Skinner highlights that "the biggest problem of the State Department is not a lack of resources," but the belief that it is "an independent institution that knows what is best for the U.S." (Skinner). The scholar and former Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department during the Trump administration emphasizes these points, considering the difficulty in accepting a conservative international approach by State Department employees (the equivalent of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in other countries). https://image.nostr.build/049939926793e86000b300b9a962dc0ae7e271d9a607ae36d8cb08642adf4174.jpg Political Leadership and Bureaucratic Support To align the State Department with presidential priorities, Kiron suggests appointing political leaders who are committed to the president's vision. "Leadership should include political appointees in positions that do not require Senate confirmation, including senior advisors and deputy secretaries" (Skinner). Furthermore, she emphasizes the importance of training and supporting these appointees to ensure effective coordination between agencies. https://image.nostr.build/6ed704cc9612aa6489e048b143f1e489c1f8807fdf2ab011b4ba88e4a1e3619a.jpg Global Threats to the U.S. The document identifies five countries that pose significant threats to the security and prosperity of the U.S.: China, Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and North Korea. 🇨🇳 China: Skinner argues that China represents an existential threat. "The U.S. needs a strategic cost-imposing response to make Beijing's aggression economically unviable" (Skinner). Additionally, she emphasizes that the issue is not with the Chinese people, but with the communist dictatorship that oppresses them: "As with all global struggles against communist and other tyrannical regimes, the issue should never be with the Chinese people, but with the communist dictatorship that oppresses them" (Skinner). https://image.nostr.build/e707273f1d08bdc4187123a312bd116695b5f603066e11ad30fcef4466730b6b.jpg 🇮🇷 Iran: The Obama administration, through the 2015 nuclear deal, provided the Iranian regime with a "crucial cash bailout" (Skinner). Kiron criticizes this approach, asserting that the U.S. should support the Iranian people in their demands for a democratic government. "The correct policy for Iran is one that recognizes that it is in the U.S. national security interests and the human rights of Iranians that they have the democratic government they demand" (Skinner). https://image.nostr.build/cda7d29a62981f59ad8d77362b3867b552f190c8d7e0e8d9233cb7c1d1d0309e.jpg 🇻🇪 Venezuela: Under the regimes of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela has transitioned from a prosperous country to one of the poorest in South America. Skinner suggests that the U.S. should work to contain Venezuelan communism and support its people. "The next administration should take steps to put Venezuela's communist abusers on notice and make progress in helping the Venezuelan people" (Skinner). https://image.nostr.build/f53e12564cae74d4b50c24b0f3752dd2c53b70bd1c00a16df20736fb8588417d.jpg 🇷🇺 Russia: The war between Russia and Ukraine divides opinions among conservatives, and the document considers three lines of action. Some advocate continuing support for Ukraine, while others believe that such support does not serve U.S. security interests. "The conservative approach rejects both isolationism and interventionism, first asking: What is in the interest of the American people?" https://image.nostr.build/8fedaf77129f4801f4edb8b169b2ac93a3e518b8bf3642b3abc62575b5435fa3.jpg One conservative school of thought believes that "Moscow's illegal war of aggression against Ukraine represents major challenges to U.S. interests, as well as to peace, stability, and the post-Cold War security order in Europe" (Skinner). This view advocates for continued U.S. involvement, including military and economic aid, to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin and return to pre-invasion border lines. Another conservative school of thought argues that U.S. support for Ukraine is not in the interest of U.S. national security. According to this view, "Ukraine is not a member of the NATO alliance and is one of the most corrupt countries in the region" (Skinner). It is argued that the European nations directly affected by the conflict should help defend Ukraine, but the U.S. should seek a swift end to the conflict through a negotiated settlement. https://image.nostr.build/22db3d0e79340c1d62344a2b8a3bfddbe4d5bd923cf77d70cfbf5ebf73e4db3e.jpg A third conservative viewpoint avoids both isolationism and interventionism, proposing that "each foreign policy decision should first ask: What is in the interest of the American people?" (Skinner). From this perspective, continued U.S. involvement should be fully funded, limited to military aid while European allies address Ukraine's economic needs, and must have a clear national security strategy that does not endanger American lives. https://image.nostr.build/939fea0bb5c69f171a3da1073e197edcff23a600430b3bc455f6d41bc8a0319f.jpg Although not stated explicitly, I believe this third viewpoint is the one Kiron Skinner desires, as she considers American intervention important but advocates for balancing the costs of the war with its partners in the European Union and NATO. https://image.nostr.build/d1d0c7fb27bfc5dd14b8dde459b98ed6b7ca2706473b2580e0fbf5383f5a9c10.jpg 🇰🇵 North Korea: North Korea must be deterred from any military conflict and cannot be allowed to remain a de facto nuclear power. "The U.S. cannot allow North Korea to remain a de facto nuclear power with the capability to threaten the U.S. or its allies" (Skinner). https://image.nostr.build/95febb04f6d2e0575974a5e645fc7b5ec3b826b8828237ccc1f49b11d11d6bce.jpg Detailed Policy Proposals Refugee Admissions: The Biden administration has caused a collapse in border security and internal immigration enforcement, according to Skinner. She argues that the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) should be resized. "The federal government should redirect screening and verification resources to the border crisis, indefinitely reducing the number of USRAP refugee admissions until the crisis can be contained" (Skinner). https://image.nostr.build/a5740b33842e47b9a1ab58c7b72bd6514f9b6ffbb18706deed1445c59236bc0d.jpg Corporate Collaboration with China: Skinner criticizes the collaboration of companies like BlackRock and Disney with the Chinese regime, noting that "many are invested in an unwavering faith in the international system and global norms," refusing to acknowledge Beijing's malign activities. She emphasizes that the real issue is the communist dictatorship that oppresses the Chinese people, not the Chinese citizens themselves (Skinner). https://image.nostr.build/05a3c787f144c4519c2ee8a4b22e64b8729842819ace4b439c849ef70ecd60b4.jpg Fentanyl and Mexico: The trafficking of fentanyl, facilitated by Mexican cartels in collaboration with Chinese precursor chemical manufacturers, is a critical problem. "Mexican cartels, working closely with Chinese manufacturers of fentanyl precursor chemicals, are sending this drug to the U.S., causing an unprecedented lethal impact" (Skinner). The next administration should adopt a firm stance to halt this public health crisis. https://image.nostr.build/59e32aeef5dabab3344a94a3e415d57fed91fece8bc3c5f068e9f6f7d71f99bd.jpg Re-hemispherization of Manufacturing: Kiron proposes that the U.S. promote the relocation of manufacturing to partner countries such as Mexico and Canada. "The U.S. should do everything possible to shift global manufacturing to Central and South American countries, especially to move it away from China" (Skinner). This would improve the supply chain and represent a significant economic boost for the region. https://image.nostr.build/5d5d7d792f1c94eb6e2bd7a4b86c43236765719e183be8ba8e00ed7dd07eca66.jpg Abraham Accords and a New “Quad”: Skinner suggests that the next administration should expand the Abraham Accords to include countries like Saudi Arabia and form a new security pact in the Middle East that includes Israel, Egypt, Gulf states, and possibly India. "Protecting the freedom of navigation in the Gulf and the Red Sea/Suez Canal is vital for the global economy and, therefore, for U.S. prosperity" (Skinner). https://image.nostr.build/c87cd99cb3ea2bef40e9d1f1fea48b0c9f9f031f3077fff658f15f850e7b8589.jpg Policy for Africa: The U.S. strategy for Africa should shift focus from humanitarian assistance to economic growth and countering China’s malign activities. "Development assistance should focus on fostering free market systems and involving the U.S. private sector" (Skinner). She also highlights that African nations are opposed to the imposition of policies such as abortion and LGBT lobbying. https://image.nostr.build/44df42f32e61c14786ac46c231d368b14df4dc18124a0da458e8506f917302f2.jpg Relations with Europe and Asia Europe: The U.S. should demand that NATO countries increase their contributions to defense. "The U.S. cannot be expected to provide a defense umbrella for countries that do not contribute adequately" (Skinner). Additionally, urgent trade agreements should be pursued with the post-Brexit United Kingdom. https://image.nostr.build/6c013bacfa9e6505ad717104d9a6065f27664a321dd2c3d41fd7635258042d2f.jpg Asia: The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan was humiliating and created new challenges. Skinner emphasizes the importance of India as a critical partner to counterbalance the Chinese threat and promote a free and open Indo-Pacific. Cooperation within the Quad, which includes the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia, is essential to this strategy. "The priority is to advance U.S.-India cooperation as a pillar of the Quad" (Skinner). https://image.nostr.build/1cc988b2f70d855c9676d7e38ffdb23564d04ad6333a8d256698f416a1c6704e.jpg International Organizations Skinner criticizes the corruption and failure of the World Health Organization (WHO) during the Covid-19 pandemic. "The next administration should end blind support for international organizations and direct the Secretary of State to initiate a cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in all international organizations" (Skinner). She also supports the “Geneva Consensus Declaration on Women’s Health and Protection of the Family,” which is against abortion, and believes that the U.S. government should not fund international organizations that promote abortion (Skinner). https://image.nostr.build/0b583511fef16d68736804fae2f15850eb5c803af01f006a3fe10cdbc583f48c.jpg Conclusion Skinner’s document provides a detailed vision for reorienting U.S. foreign policy under a conservative administration, with an emphasis on ensuring that the State Department serves the national interests defined by the president. With these guidelines, the next administration has the opportunity to redefine the U.S. position on the global stage, promoting security, prosperity, and freedom. https://image.nostr.build/697522745c5947cd4384cdd302b531ee98ce5d59a5d72de0b4f3a52c9abd4821.jpg

@ 09fbf8f3:fa3d60f0

由于gmail在中国被防火墙拦截了，无法打开，不想错过邮件通知。

通过自建ntfy接受gmail邮件通知。 怎么自建ntfy，后面再写。

---

2024年08月13日更新：

修改不通过添加邮件标签来标记已经发送的通知，通过Google Sheets来记录已经发送的通知。

为了不让Google Sheets文档的内容很多，导致文件变大，用脚本自动清理一个星期以前的数据。

---

准备工具

• Ntfy服务
• Google Script
• Google Sheets

操作步骤

1. 在Ntfy后台账号，设置访问令牌。
2. 添加订阅主题。
3. 进入Google Sheets创建一个表格.记住id，如下图：
4. 进入Google Script创建项目。填入以下代码（注意填入之前的ntfy地址和令牌）：

```javascript function checkEmail() { var sheetId = "你的Google Sheets id"; // 替换为你的 Google Sheets ID var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.openById(sheetId).getActiveSheet();

// 清理一星期以前的数据 cleanOldData(sheet, 7 * 24 * 60); // 保留7天（即一周）内的数据

var sentEmails = getSentEmails(sheet);

var threads = GmailApp.search('is:unread'); Logger.log("Found threads: " + threads.length);

if (threads.length === 0) return;

threads.forEach(function(thread) { var threadId = thread.getId();

if (!sentEmails.includes(threadId)) {
  thread.getMessages().forEach(sendNtfyNotification);
  recordSentEmail(sheet, threadId);
}

}); }

function sendNtfyNotification(email) { if (!email) { Logger.log("Email object is undefined or null."); return; }

var message = `发件人: ${email.getFrom() || "未知发件人"} 主题: ${email.getSubject() || "无主题"}

内容: ${email.getPlainBody() || "无内容"}`;

var url = "https://你的ntfy地址/Gmail"; var options = { method: "post", payload: message, headers: { Authorization: "Bearer Ntfy的令牌" }, muteHttpExceptions: true };

try { var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, options); Logger.log("Response: " + response.getContentText()); } catch (e) { Logger.log("Error: " + e.message); } }

function getSentEmails(sheet) { var data = sheet.getDataRange().getValues(); return data.map(row => row[0]); // Assuming email IDs are stored in the first column }

function recordSentEmail(sheet, threadId) { sheet.appendRow([threadId, new Date()]); }

function cleanOldData(sheet, minutes) { var now = new Date(); var thresholdDate = new Date(now.getTime() - minutes * 60 * 1000); // 获取X分钟前的时间

var data = sheet.getDataRange().getValues(); var rowsToDelete = [];

data.forEach(function(row, index) { var date = new Date(row[1]); // 假设日期保存在第二列 if (date < thresholdDate) { rowsToDelete.push(index + 1); // 存储要删除的行号 } });

// 逆序删除（从最后一行开始删除，以避免行号改变） rowsToDelete.reverse().forEach(function(row) { sheet.deleteRow(row); }); }

```

4.Goole Script需要添加gmail服务，如图：

5.Google Script是有限制的不能频繁调用，可以设置五分钟调用一次。如图：

结尾

本人不会代码，以上代码都是通过chatgpt生成的。经过多次修改，刚开始会一直发送通知，后面修改后将已发送的通知放到一个“通知”的标签里。后续不会再次发送通知。

如需要发送通知后自动标记已读，可以把代码复制到chatgpt给你写。

效果预览：

@ 129f5189:3a441803

Project 2025, outlined in the "Mandate for Leadership" document by the Heritage Foundation, is a crucial guide for the next Republican administration. Crafted by conservative intellectuals from major American think tanks, this plan promises to have significant influence on a potential Donald Trump administration, even if he does not formally acknowledge it as his government plan. https://image.nostr.build/443d69c16dc32659be2353ce48d170d397e0ee682ffc3c4108df3047fd54472d.jpg This document presents proposals to depoliticize government agencies, increase efficiency, and reduce costs, aiming to dismantle the Deep State and combat the Woke agenda associated with the Democratic Party. https://image.nostr.build/06de3f0de3d48e086f47d0418d30e32cbfe0d88f452a93706987b7394458952d.jpg Dissolution of the DHS and Redistribution of Functions The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established in 2002 in response to the September 11 attacks, with the goal of consolidating various agencies responsible for domestic security under a single command. The DHS includes agencies such as FEMA, TSA, ICE, and CISA. Project 2025's proposal to dissolve the DHS and redistribute its functions to other agencies aims to address excessive bureaucracy and a lack of cohesion, arguing that centralization has failed to effectively integrate its diverse missions. https://image.nostr.build/ffca8d274914b725183b8fb19162c1b63f4d987c24e598f2eca88901d4a1a43c.jpg Impact on the Democratic Deep State: The dissolution of the DHS would pose a significant threat to the Democratic Deep State, as it would redistribute the power concentrated in a single entity across multiple other agencies, making it more difficult to politicize and centralize control over domestic security operations. This decentralization would reduce the ability to use the DHS as a political tool against opponents. https://image.nostr.build/1597e3b88572fe8aae7ce67cdaf975a873cf8bc68f76d59cb4253ad1520fc7bc.jpg Primary Recommendations Combining Immigration Agencies: Merge U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) into a new autonomous border and immigration agency. https://image.nostr.build/58eef4f2eca0ed2400261ec878c1dba2ca4bca519a16751b1fb7abd45da2906b.jpg Privatization of the TSA: Privatize the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), drawing inspiration from Canadian and European models, to reduce costs and improve service for travelers. Division of the Secret Service (USSS): The U.S. Secret Service (USSS), responsible for protecting national leaders and investigating financial crimes, would be divided. The protective element would be transferred to the Department of Justice (DOJ), while the financial investigations element would be moved to the Department of the Treasury. https://image.nostr.build/0a065cdbf158db4bc17b9aacd4af5a94029004caaa152eebf2c557042b08a641.jpg Impact on the Democratic Deep State: The division of the USSS would significantly weaken centralized control over protection and financial investigations, making it more difficult to use these functions for political purposes. Transferring the protective element to the DOJ and the financial investigations element to the Treasury would complicate efforts for any group or party to manipulate these crucial government functions for partisan objectives. https://image.nostr.build/1597e3b88572fe8aae7ce67cdaf975a873cf8bc68f76d59cb4253ad1520fc7bc.jpg Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Established in 2018, CISA is a federal agency responsible for protecting the U.S. critical infrastructure from cyber threats. CISA's mandate includes ensuring cybersecurity for sectors such as energy, transportation, and healthcare, and it collaborates with public and private entities to strengthen the country’s cyber resilience. Criticisms and Restructuring Proposals: Project 2025 strongly criticizes CISA for deviating from its original mission and being used as a political tool for censoring speech and influencing elections. The proposal is to transfer CISA to the Department of Transportation (DOT) and return the agency to its statutory focus. https://image.nostr.build/8bfb4a45053de96a775f67e3e1b83a44d9a65fee4705e3b16d3359bd799b8af2.jpg Review of Executive Order 12333 Executive Order 12333, issued in 1981, sets guidelines for U.S. intelligence activities, including the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information. Project 2025 proposes a review of this order to ensure that intelligence agencies are not used for political purposes but are focused on protecting national security. Objectives of the Review: Prevent Abuse: Ensure that intelligence collection is conducted legally, without being used to target political opponents. Ensure Impartiality: Reaffirm that intelligence operations must be conducted impartially, with a sole focus on the country's security. https://image.nostr.build/90d31cb35a33048d311716df2fbc65c97bd4c1972977e266133654404393fca0.jpg Reforms in Public Service Facilitation of Public Employee Dismissal: Project 2025 emphasizes the need to simplify the process for dismissing public employees who do not perform their duties impartially or who promote specific political agendas. Performance Evaluations: The document highlights the importance of merit-based compensation, stating that performance evaluations are only effective when tied to real consequences. Research indicates that 90% of major private companies in the U.S. use a merit-based pay system linked to evaluations. However, in the federal government, compensation remains largely based on seniority, despite efforts to adopt merit-based pay. https://image.nostr.build/1b858fd7b2a23c3c65c0677d3e69c44976721bbdcbe7facf4682ba3371562cff.jpg Inclusion of Employees Aligned with Conservative Values: Aligned Hiring: Establish mechanisms to hire public employees who share conservative values, ensuring that the policies and practices of agencies are consistent with the principles endorsed by the administration. https://image.nostr.build/ddbf5c59e7bb479998433991347f9d301dd117fbca0edb0f94e98fcac90b2974.jpg Controversial Cases and Politicization: Hunter Biden Laptop Case: Project 2025 harshly criticizes the FBI and the Department of Justice, accusing them of acting in a biased and politically motivated manner. The authors suggest that the agency is intimidating parents who protest by labeling them as "domestic terrorists," while simultaneously suppressing politically unfavorable speech under the guise of combating "disinformation." Furthermore, the critique highlights that the FBI is alleged to be neglecting violent attacks on pregnancy centers and violations of laws prohibiting attempts to intimidate Supreme Court justices. The criticism intensifies with allegations that the FBI interfered in domestic elections and engaged in propaganda operations, specifically citing the purported Russian collusion conspiracy in 2016 and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop case in 2020, which is seen as a threat to the Republic. https://image.nostr.build/e4f571a14102a939164465498bef514379ec0443e71a58e12f50c518e00570c6.jpg Politicization of the FBI: Election Interference: Russia Hoax and Trump, Suppression of Hunter Biden’s Laptop, and Big Tech Collusion. Revelations about the FBI’s role in the 2016 "Russia Hoax" and the suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 suggest that the agency may have strayed from its impartial duties. These actions indicate concerning politicization, where the agency appears to have been used to influence the political landscape in favor of certain interests. This includes collaboration between the FBI and Big Tech companies to control discourse. https://image.nostr.build/5dcd45fcec939b782d29d8d2e3d3b45244c525b5dbd3240f1629a4632e390a86.jpg Comprehensive Review of FBI Investigations: It is crucial to conduct an immediate and thorough review of all significant investigations and activities within the FBI, terminating those that are illegal or contrary to national interests. This step is essential for restoring public trust in the FBI. A public report on the findings of this review could enhance transparency and confidence. https://image.nostr.build/df98e2c6aff123d806187eab13d24a3ebb30a87df1f44cf57be97dc5624fff88.jpg Structural Reorganization: Align the FBI within the Department of Justice (DOJ) according to its purposes of national security and law enforcement. The agency should be under the supervision of the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division and the National Security Division, ensuring that the FBI does not operate as an independent entity but is instead subordinated to the DOJ’s directives. https://image.nostr.build/0d1c0015c6b67a8afc2dd1595357ea571fcd5a9d83829065f49f9b60cf553eb0.jpg Prohibition on Policing Speech: Prohibit the FBI from engaging in activities related to combating "disinformation" or "misinformation" disseminated by Americans who are not linked to plausible criminal activities. The Constitution, through the First Amendment, prohibits the government from policing speech, ensuring a healthy public debate without governmental intervention. All these measures represent a significant attack on the "Deep State" within American institutions. These public policies have been considered a dictatorial threat by many sectors of the American press. However, the real issue should be the politicization of unelected bureaucrats by a political faction. https://image.nostr.build/9a44b19d15d53314f89528c1d89e2f637030ea18d8907a6a8c4e27d07064b8ec.jpg Combating Woke Culture in the Intelligence Community Future leadership of the Intelligence Community (IC) needs to implement a plan to replace the "woke" culture and identity politics that have spread throughout the federal government. The goal is to restore traditional American values such as patriotism, racial impartiality, and job competence, which have been replaced by advocacy for "social justice" and identity politics. https://image.nostr.build/7929dca5e36273c8e751f36d6ca6229f362e30792bce735f10be7e5d8581af5f.jpg Final Considerations The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is not merely an administrative reform plan; it is a manifesto of resistance against the Washington status quo. The proposals aim to dismantle established power structures, eliminate politicization, and combat the Woke agenda. If implemented, this plan would profoundly impact how the U.S. government operates, promoting a more efficient, limited government aligned with conservative principles. Threat to the Democratic Deep State: A potential new administration under Donald Trump represents an existential threat to the Democratic Deep State entrenched in American institutions. The dissolution of the DHS, depoliticization of intelligence agencies, division of the Secret Service, review of Executive Order 12333, privatization of the TSA, and the hiring of employees aligned with conservative values are all measures that would significantly weaken centralized control and the ability to use these institutions for political purposes. By dismantling concentrated power and promoting a more transparent and accountable government, Project 2025 aims to restore public trust and ensure that government agencies serve national interests rather than partisan ones. Of course, not all aspects of the plan may be implemented, but the prospect of several of these measures being enacted should be a cause for concern for the Democratic Deep State.

@ 129f5189:3a441803

Today we will understand how Argentina, when under the control of the Foro de São Paulo, was an important asset for the Chinese Communist Party in South America and how Javier Milei is charting paths to change this scenario. The Chinese government has been making diplomatic overtures to areas near the polar regions as part of its maritime strategy. After a "strategic retreat," the Southern Hemisphere has assumed a new dimension for Chinese interests in South America. Beijing has been increasing its diplomatic engagement with countries in the region, especially Argentina in recent times, through a series of economic, sociocultural, and to a lesser extent, military agreements. This includes the delivery of vaccines and the intention to accelerate an investment plan worth $30 million. China has focused on several geopolitically sensitive projects in Argentina, all strategic: controlling air and maritime space and strategic facilities in territorial areas monitored by Beijing over Antarctica and the South Atlantic. However, doubts arise about China's intentions... https://image.nostr.build/f55fc5464d8d09cbbddd0fe803b264a5e885da387c2c6c1702f021875beb18c2.jpg For Xi Jinping's government, Argentina stands out for its strategic location, the influential posture of its leaders, and its alignment with China's economic and military power expansion. China has made significant investments and infrastructure initiatives in various Argentine regions. In addition to establishing a presence in the province of Neuquén, China has targeted the port city of Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica, the South Atlantic islands, and the San Juan region near the Chilean border. A 2012 agreement between authorities in Argentina's Neuquén province and Beijing allowed the construction of a deep space tracking station near the Chilean border, which caught Washington's attention. https://image.nostr.build/a3fa7f2c7174ee9d90aaecd9eadb69a2ef82c04c94584165a213b29d2ae8a66e.jpg In 2014, through a bilateral agreement between the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, represented by the Satellite Launch and Tracking Control General (CLTC) of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and Argentina's National Commission on Space Activities (CONAE), the agreement identified the Argentine space station at Bajada del Agrio as the most favorable location for hosting a Chinese base in the Southern Hemisphere. The project became operational in 2017 on a 200-hectare area and represents the third in a global network and the first outside China. It features a 110-ton, 35-meter-diameter antenna for deep space exploration (telemetry and technology for "terrestrial tracking, command, and data acquisition"), with the CLTC having a special exploration license for a period of 50 years. https://image.nostr.build/0a469d8bab900c7cefa854594dfdb934febf2758e1a77c7639d394f14cd98491.jpg The 50-year contract grants the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) the ability to operate freely on Argentine soil. The facility, known as Espacio Lejano, set a precedent for a Chinese ground tracking station in Río Gallegos, on the southeastern coast of Argentina, which was formally announced in 2021. In 2016, a document issued by the U.S. State Council Information Office raised concerns among the U.S. government and European Union (EU) countries about the potential military and geopolitical uses of the base in the Southern Hemisphere and Antarctica. Another element fueling suspicion is the existence of "secret clauses" in a document signed by the General Directorate of Legal Advisory (DICOL) of Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade, and Worship with the Chinese government. https://image.nostr.build/1733ba03475755ddf9be4eafc3e9eb838ba8f9fa6e783a4b060f12b89c3f4165.jpg Since the Espacio Lejano contract was signed, U.S. analysts and authorities have repeatedly expressed concern about China's growing collaboration with Argentina on security and surveillance issues. In 2023, a general from the U.S. Southern Command stated during a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee: "The PRC [People's Republic of China] has expanded its capacity to extract resources, establish ports, manipulate governments through predatory investment practices, and build potential dual-use space facilities." https://image.nostr.build/16bbdeae11247d47a97637402866a0414d235d41fe8039218e26c9d11392b487.jpg The shift in the Argentine government from a leftist spectrum, led by leaders of the São Paulo Forum, to a Milei administration, which has always advocated for libertarian and pro-Western rhetoric, has altered the dynamics of Chinese-Argentine relations in 2024. Milei assumed office on December 10, 2023, replacing the progressive president Alberto Fernández, who had strengthened ties with China and signed an agreement in 2022 to join the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative. During his campaign, Milei did not hide his disdain for communist regimes and signaled his intention to move away from socialist policies in favor of a more libertarian direction. In the nearly seven months since taking office, Milei has implemented major economic reforms and streamlined the government. https://image.nostr.build/1d534b254529bf10834d81e2ae35ce2698eda2453d5e2b39d98fa50b45c00a59.jpg Other recent "positive indicators" suggest that the Milei administration is prioritizing defense relations with the United States over China, according to Leland Lazarus, Associate Director of National Security at the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University. "The fact is that, in just six months, he has already visited the United States several times. He has met with Secretary [Antony] Blinken, been to the White House... all of this is like absolute music to General Richardson's ears; to President [Joe] Biden's ears," Lazarus told Epoch Times. General Richardson visited Argentina in April, a trip that included the donation of a C-130H Hercules transport aircraft to the Argentine Air Force and a visit to a naval facility in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of the country. "We are committed to working closely with Argentina so that our collaborative security efforts benefit our citizens, our countries, and our hemisphere in enduring and positive ways," she said in a statement at the time. In Ushuaia, General Richardson met with local military personnel to discuss their role in "safeguarding vital maritime routes for global trade." https://image.nostr.build/f6d80fee8a7bba03bf11235d86c4f72435ae4be7d201dba81cc8598551e5ed24.jpg In a statement from the Argentine Ministry of Defense, Milei confirmed that General Richardson also reviewed the progress of an "integrated naval base" at the Ushuaia naval facility. Argentine officials said they also discussed "legislative modernization on defense issues." Under the previous administration, China had received preferential treatment. In June 2023, Tierra del Fuego Governor Gustavo Melella approved China's plans to build a "multi-use" port facility near the Strait of Magellan. The project was met with legislative backlash, as three national deputies and members of the Civic Coalition filed an official complaint against the governor's provincial decree to build the port with Beijing. The same group also accused Melella of compromising Argentina’s national security. No public records show that the project has progressed since then. https://image.nostr.build/3b2b57875dc7ac162ab2b198df238cb8479a7d0bbce32b4042e11063b5e2779b.jpg Argentina's desire for deeper security cooperation with Western partners was also evident in April when Argentine Defense Minister Luis Petri signed a historic agreement to purchase 24 F-16 fighter jets from Denmark. "Today we are concluding the most important military aviation acquisition since 1983," Petri said in an official statement. "Thanks to this investment in defense, I can proudly say that we are beginning to restore our air sovereignty and that our entire society is better protected against all the threats we face." https://image.nostr.build/8aa0a6261e61e35c888d022a537f03a0fb7a963a78bf2f1bec9bf0a242289dba.jpg The purchase occurred after several media reports in 2022 indicated that the previous Fernández administration was considering buying JF-17 fighter jets made in China and Pakistan. A former minister from ex-president Mauricio Macri's government, who requested anonymity, confirmed to Epoch Times that a deal to acquire JF-17 jets was being considered during the Fernández era. Chinese investment did not occur only in Argentina. According to a document from the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee: "From 2009 to 2019, China transferred a total of $634 million in significant military equipment to five South American countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. The governments of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Argentina purchased defense equipment from the PRC, cooperated in military exercises, and engaged in educational exchanges and training for their military personnel." https://image.nostr.build/ed6d8daeea418b7e233ef97c90dee5074be64bd572f1fd0a5452b5960617c9ca.jpg Access to space plays a crucial role in the CCP's strategic objectives. Thus, when reports emerged in early April that Milei's government wanted to inspect Espacio Lejano, experts suggested it supported his national security moves away from China. According to the Espacio Lejano contract, signed under Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's Peronist regime, CCP officials are not required to let anyone—including the Argentine president—enter the facility without prior notice. According to Article 3, the agreement stipulates that Argentine authorities cannot interfere with or interrupt the "normal activities" of the facility and must explore alternative options and provide an unspecified amount of notice before being granted access. China has maintained that Espacio Lejano is for deep space exploration, lunar missions, and communication with satellites already in orbit. However, there is deep skepticism that the claim of space exploration alone is highly unlikely. The big question is: what could this facility do in times of war? https://image.nostr.build/f46a2807c02c512e70b14981f07a7e669223a42f3907cbddec952d5b27da9895.jpg Neuquén is just one of 11 ground stations and space research facilities China has in Latin America and the Caribbean. This represents the largest concentration of space equipment China has outside its own country. According to data from the Gordon Institute, the Chinese Espacio Lejano station and the Río Gallegos facility provide an ideal surveillance position near the polar orbit. The polar orbit is useful for data collection, transmission, and tracking because it allows for observation of the entire planet from space. The resolution of communications is also improved due to the proximity of satellites in orbit to the Earth's surface. Additionally, it offers strategic advantages for any government involved in espionage. https://image.nostr.build/39215a4c9f84cbbaf517c4fda8a562bba9e0cd3af3d453a24d3a9b454c5d015d.jpg Regarding deeper security collaboration with the United States, the trend is that Milei’s government will do as much as possible without jeopardizing its contracts with China, which is currently Argentina's second-largest trading partner. However, if Argentina's defense cooperation with China cools, the communist regime might wait for another Argentine government to continue its expansion—a government that could be more favorable to the CCP's objectives. Everything will depend on the continued success of Javier Milei's economic miracle, ensuring his government is re-elected and he can appoint a successor, making it more challenging for China, and avoiding a situation similar to what occurred in Brazil starting in 2023. https://image.nostr.build/a5dd3e59a703c553be60534ac5a539b1e50496c71904d01b16471086e9843cd4.jpg

@ e83b66a8:b0526c2b

Here are some of the more interesting projects that I like:

Messaging:

https://www.0xchat.com/#/ - Private messaging - think WhatsApp

Xitter Like Clients:

https://damus.io/ - iPhone client

https://nostrapps.com/amethyst - Android client

https://primal.net/downloads - Android, iPhone & Desktop

Interesting sites:

https://zap.stream/ - Video streaming

https://fountain.fm/ - Podcasting

https://wavlake.com/ - Music streaming

https://shopstr.store/ - Online shop

https://zap.cooking/recent - Cooking recipes

https://ostrich.work/ - NOSTR jobs board

NOSTR tools

https://nostr.band/ - Powerful search tool

https://nostr.wine/ - Powerful, but centralised paid relay

https://npub.pro/ - Website creation tool

https://nostr.build/ - Media and file storage

https://relay.tools/ - Build and curate your own relay

https://creatr.nostr.wine/subscriptions/new-user - Creator tools

List of NOSTR apps:

https://nostrapps.com/

@ e83b66a8:b0526c2b

We have a confession to make. NOSTR is not perfect, we are still building. No client you use does everything you want it to, and everything it does is imperfect.

Therefore, I strongly advise you to run multiple clients.

On iPhone, I run: Damus: https://nostrapps.com/damus Primal: https://primal.net/downloads Nostur: https://nostrapps.com/nostur

On Android I run: Primal: https://primal.net/downloads Amethyst: https://nostrapps.com/amethyst

On desktop I run: Primal: https://primal.net/downloads noStrudel: https://nostrapps.com/nostrudel

Also, because I run a node (Umbrel & Start9), I self host noStrudel on my own relay.

If you haven’t taken the plunge to run a node, now might be a good time to think about it.

There are many, many options for clients, the “Social” section of https://nostrapps.com/

lists 23 currently.

Play with them, see what they do, if you’re a developer, you could even consider building or forking your own.

Have fun and realise we are building freedom tech, not just running it.

@ e83b66a8:b0526c2b

First,

Key management.

When you “created” your NOSTR account, what you actually created was a cryptographic key pair. This consists of a private key, which starts “nsec” and a public key which starts with “npub”.

As the names suggest, your “nsec” key is private and you should never reveal it to anyone. Your “npub” key is your public key, feel free to share that everywhere.

Your “npub” key is used by others to verify your identity, through the signature added to your messages. It is also used by others to encrypt private messages to you.

We don’t have perfect key management yet and because of the limitation of smart phones and various eco systems, it often becomes necessary for you to copy and paste your private key into apps in order to use them. This is less than ideal, but until we have ubiquitous cross platform key management devices, this situation will remain necessary.

For the moment, consider using software key management options, some of which are listed under “signers” here: https://nostrapps.com/

N.B. We do have projects like Seedsigner that provide more secure hardware key management, but this isn’t for the faint hearted:

Secondly,

Lightning wallets.

It is common for most people to link a Bitcoin Lightning wallet to their NOSTR profile

N.B. Your profile is stored on relays and signed by your private key, which is verified by others through your public key.

You are not tied to any specific wallet for sending payments (called zaps), but you do provide a specific incoming LN address for receiving payments. This could be something like a wallet of Satoshi Address i.e. “randomname@walletofsatoshi.com” or could you be your own node with a connection to it via “Nostr Wallet Connect” a free plugin that connects a lightning wallet.

Enabling this allows people to “zap” any posts or content or even send you payments directly at any time or for any reason. N.B. It is called freedom money for a reason….

It also allows you to send small micropayments to posts or people you like.

Thirdly,

Paid Services

As you go deeper into the NOSTR ecosystem, you’ll notice there is no advertising being pushed at you and there are no algorithms manipulating the content you receive. This is because there is no company behind NOSTR, it is a protocol. Because of this, while all the ecosystem is free to use and will remain so for the foreseeable future, most of it is run by enthusiastic volunteers or developers and incurs a cost to them. For that reason many of us choose to support these #devs by paying for services. This can also enhance our experience, giving our “npub” greater reach and discoverability.

I, for example choose to pay for the following services:

https://nostr.wine/ - 120,000 Sats for 2 years relay https://relay.tools/ - My own relay - https://nortis.nostr1.com/ 12,000 Sats a month https://nostr.build/ - Media storage - 69,000 Sats for 1 year

Total: 22,750 Sats per month Approx $15 per month

This is not strictly necessary, but I decided to support the various developers behind these projects.

Do not feel any pressure at this early stage to pay for any service, but if you enjoy the freedom NOSTR brings, you may want to consider supporting the projects that become important to you going forward.

@ c11cf5f8:4928464d

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/678432

@ e968e50b:db2a803a

Open the frozen pizza bay doors, Hal.

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/678403

@ 6bae33c8:607272e8

I’ll write a separate Week 1 Observations later, but I wanted to dedicate this space solely to mourning my Circa Survivor entry.

Circa Survivor costs $1000 to enter and has a $10M prize for the winner, usually split by several as things get down to the wire. Three years ago, when the prize was $6M Dalton Del Don and I — the first time we ever entered — made it to the final 23 in Week 12. The value of our share was something like $260K at that point, but we got bounced by the Lions who beat the 12-point favored Cardinals and took home nothing.

When you enter a large survivor pool, the overwhelming likelihood is you’ll meet this fate at some point, whether in Week 1 or 12. So it’s not really the loss that’s painful, so much as not getting to live and die each week with a chosen team. You lose your status as “the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood” and become just an observer watching and commentating on the games without the overarching purpose of surviving each week.

This year was also different due to the lengths to which I went to sign up. It’s not just the $1000 fee, it’s getting to Vegas in person, the $400 in proxy fees (you need locals to input your picks for you if you don’t live there), the $60 credit card fee, the $200 crappy hotel I booked at the last minute, the flights (one of which was cancelled due to heat), the rental car that necessitated, the gas, getting lost in the desert, the entire odyssey while sick and still jet-lagged in 122-degree heat.

But it’s not about the money, and it’s not even about the herculean effort per se, but the feeling and narrative I crafted around it. I was the guy who got this done. I flew from Portugal to San Francisco for 12 hours, two days later from SF to Palm Springs to help my 87-YO uncle with his affairs, improvised to get from Palm Springs to Vegas, which took six hours due to road closures, signed up for the contests, made the flight back to San Francisco, flew to Denver at 7 am the next day, took my daughter the Rockies game in the afternoon and then on to Boulder the following day. Maybe that’s not so impressive to some of you, but for me, an idle ideas person, a thinker, observer, someone who likes to express himself via a keyboard, it was like Alexander the Great conquering Persia.

And it’s not only about that smaller mission, or the narrative I crafted around it, but a larger one which was to bring sports content to nostr which I vowed to do before the summer which is why I felt I had to make the effort to get to Vegas to sign up for the contests, to have sufficient skin in the game, to have something real about which to write.

And I got the idea to do this seriously because Heather wrote a guide to Lisbon which I posted on nostr, and a few prominent developers there were surprisingly excited about getting that kind of quality content on the protocol. And I thought — if they’re this excited about a (very in-depth) guide to one particular city in Europe, how much more value could I create posting about a hobby shared by 50-odd million Americans? And that thought (and the fact I had to go to Palm Springs anyway) is what set me off on the mission in the first place and got me thinking this would be Team of Destiny, Part 2, only to discover, disappointingly, it’s real destiny was not to make it out of the first week.

. . .

While my overwhelming emotion is one of disappointment, there’s a small element of relief. Survivor is a form of self-inflicted torture that probably subtracts years from one’s life. Every time Rhamondre Stevenson broke the initial tackle yesterday was like someone tightening a vice around my internal organs. There was nothing I could do but watch, and I even thought about turning it off. At one point, I was so enraged, I had to calm down consciously and refuse to get further embittered by events going against me. Mike Gesicki had a TD catch overturned because he didn’t hold the ball to the ground, The next play Tanner Hudson fumbled while running unimpeded to the end zone. I kept posting, “Don’t tilt” after every negative play.

There’s a perverse enjoyment to getting enraged about what’s going on, out of your control, on a TV screen, but when you examine the experience, it really isn’t good or wholesome. I become like a spoiled child, ungrateful for everything, miserable and indignant at myriad injustices and wrongs I’m powerless to prevent.

At one point Sasha came in to tell me she had downloaded some random game from the app store on her Raspberry Pi computer. I had no interest in this as I was living and dying with every play, but I had forced myself to calm down so much already, I actually went into her room to check it out, not a trace of annoyance in my voice or demeanor.

I don’t think she cared about the game, or about showing it to me, but had stayed with her friends most of the weekend and was just using it as an excuse to spend a moment together with her dad. I scratched her back for a couple seconds while standing behind her desk chair. The game was still going on, and even though I was probably going to lose, and I was still sick about it, I was glad to have diverted a moment’s attention from it to Sasha.

. . .

In last week’s Survivor post, I wrote:

What method do I propose to see into the future? Only my imagination. I’m going to spend a lot of time imagining what might happen, turn my brain into a quantum device, break space-time and come to the right answers. Easier said than done, but I’m committed.

It’s possible I did this, but simply retrieved my information from the wrong branch of the multiverse. It happens.

. . .

I picked the Bengals knowing full well the Bills were the correct “pot odds” play which is my usual method. Maybe when the pot-odds are close, I might go with my gut, but they were not especially close this week, and yet I still stuck with Cincinnati because they were the team I trusted more.

And despite it being a bad pick — there are no excuses in Survivor, no matter what happens in the game, if you win it’s good, and lose it’s bad — I don’t feel that badly about it.

I regret it only because I wish I were still alive, but it was my error. I went with what I believed, and it was wrong. That I can live with 100 times better than swapping out my belief for someone else’s and losing. Had I done that I’d be inconsolable.

. . .

I won’t let the Survivor debacle undermine my real mission to bring sports to nostr. Team of Destiny 2 would have been a compelling story, but it was never essential. After all, my flight was cancelled and I had to improvise, so now my Survivor entry is cancelled, and I’ll have to improvise again. The branch of the multiverse where the Bengals won didn’t give me the information I wanted, but maybe it was what I really needed to know. That I am the man in the arena yet, the battle was ever against myself, and for a brief moment, while my team was losing, I prevailed.

@ d3052ca3:d84a170e

I bought this for my son but it's a little advanced for his skills. Well, somebody has to find the princess and save Hyrule, right? Looks like it's gotta be me. :)

I have found the climbing, skydiving, and barbarian armor sets most useful. What other items can I unlock that will enhance my play experience? I just found the gloom resistance helmet but haven't tried it out yet.

What is the deal with horses? I tamed and boarded two so far but I haven't found an actual use for them yet except one korok hidden under a drain plug that I needed a horse to unplug. You don't need them for travel. They can't climb steep slopes or cross water so it's just easier and faster to skydive close to your destination and cover the last miles on foot. Do mounts serve a purpose or just look cool and help you get a few korok seeds?

What is your experience? I'd love to hear about it!

@ e968e50b:db2a803a

I just wanted to let y'all know that I added a more sports themed UI option for the crossword puzzle from last week. You can get to it like so:

Also, there's still an unclaimed bounty for anybody interested in solving the additional puzzle.

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/678010

@ 44dc1c2d:31c74f0b

Chef's notes

Makes an excellent Chicken sandwich.

Details

• ⏲️ Prep time: 6 Ish hours
• 🍳 Cook time: 40 min
• 🍽️ Servings: 1 loaf

Ingredients

• 3 ½ - 4 cups bread flour, or more as needed
• 1 ⅓ cups warm milk (110°F – 115°F)
• 5 tablespoons honey
• 4 tablespoons salted butter, melted and slightly cooled
• 1 tablespoon instant “rapid rise” yeast
• 1 ½ teaspoons salt
• Oil or butter for greasing the bowl
• 1 tablespoon melted salted butter, for brushing the crust at the end

Directions

1. To prepare the dough, weigh the flour or measure it by gently spooning it into a cup, then leveling off any excess. In a large bowl, combine the flour with the warm milk, honey, melted butter, instant yeast, and salt. Mix by hand or with the paddle attachment of a stand mixer until a shaggy dough forms, gradually adding more flour, as necessary, to get the dough to come together so that it just pulls away from the sides of the bowl.
2. Switch to the dough hook attachment (or use your hands) to knead the dough until fairly smooth, about 7-8 minutes.
3. Oil a large mixing bowl. Place the dough in the greased bowl, turning once to grease the top. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, 1 ½ - 2 hours.
4. Punch down the dough. Transfer to a lightly floured work surface. Pat the dough into a 9 x 12-inch rectangle. Starting on one of the short sides, roll up the dough to make a log; pinch the seams. Place the dough seam-side down in a lightly greased 9 x 5-inch loaf pan.
5. Cover the pan with lightly greased plastic wrap; allow to rise for 1-2 hours, until it’s crowned about 1-2 inches over the rim of the pan. Towards the end of the rising time, preheat the oven to 350°F.
6. Bake the bread for 40-45 minutes, tenting the top of the bread loosely with foil towards the end if the top starts to get too brown. The bread should be golden brown, and it should sound hollow when tapped.
7. Brush the top of the warm bread with melted butter.
8. Remove from the pan and cool on a wire rack for at least 1 hour before slicing.

@ 8dc86882:9dc4ba5e

Why do lightning nodes need channels? Why can a node not just send and receive without a channel? I wonder what the benefit it serves other than making running a node difficult or making it cost to open one?

Thanks

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/677439

@ eed76ece:afa98124

Seems like if you want to sell an item on SN using @AGORA makes logical sense.

Perhaps if your a manufacturer, importer, exporter, stocking distributor, wholesaler etc. you should also consider using @Import_Export or both @AGORA and see if they help each other. Being totally upfront Import_Export is probably a better use case especially if you are running over 75% B2B.

We are note promoting the use of B2C on SN. We're 100% focused on interactions between businesses only. Our primary markets are in Asia and Southeast Asia. Europe and the UK are dying a slow death, and the last straw was the Telegram event.

So I am endorsing you to please at least on SN refer to @AGORA for basic B2C (retail).

Thank you, https://www.globalmerchant.io

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/677390

@ e8b86bc1:3503c58f

Opinion about Freewallet Multi Crypto Wallet (iphone)

Freewallet is now charging inactivity fees, a sneaky method to take money from users who aren’t regularly using the app. Avoid this scam wallet!

WalletScrutiny #nostrOpinion

Join the conversation!

@ c11cf5f8:4928464d

Considering the "whatever" item in question is a random item, a unique piece --not something you produce or need to market-- which platform, website or which strategy you'll put in place to get the value of your item in sats, immediately, anonymously, via the Lightning Network?

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/677270

@ 6f170f27:711e26dd

Far too many people: "GDP is bad. I prefer [thing correlated at 0.9 with GDP]."

Manufacturing:

Life expectancy:

Happiness:

Many other metrics & discussion in the source:

https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1832588128084730334

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/677211

@ 09fbf8f3:fa3d60f0

由于telegram的政策调整，不允许滥用telegraph匿名上传图片了。 导致之前通过telegraph搭建的图床无法上传（已上传的能正常查看）。

---

有人通过原项目的基础上分支另外项目，可以通过频道上传图片。

项目是通过cloudflare pages搭建的。 - 项目地址：https://github.com/MarSeventh/CloudFlare-ImgBed

项目的教程很详细，具体去看项目教程。

telegram设置：

• 需要有telegram账号
• 通过@BotFather创建一个telegram机器人，并获取api key。
• 创建一个频道，获取频道id，通过转发一条消息到 @VersaToolsBot机器人可以查看频道id。
• 一定要添加创建的机器人到频道作为管理员才能使用。

cloudflare的设置

• 通过git项目部署，设置变量：TG_BOT_TOKEN和TG_CHAT_ID就基本可以使用了。
• 如果需要后台，需要添加kv空间，并在设置里面的函数，选择对应的kv空间，如图：
• BASIC_USER 后台登陆名
• BASIC_PASS 后台密码
• AUTH_CODE 鉴权，防止别人使用，设置后，别人使用必须输入这个。

其他

• 成人内容屏蔽
• pico 使用api接口 去项目地址看

最后

我搭建的地址： https://imgbed.lepidus.me

@ d52f4f20:98efcdfb

original post 28/12/2010 .net

Para você que se sente meio preso ao instalar o Ubuntu, pois ele já vem pronto para um usuário final, mas isso não me agrada parece que perco o espirito de liberdade.

Mas o ponto forte Ubuntu são suas atualizações, então eu fui em busca de como fazer uma instalação customizada somente com os pacotes do Ubuntu. Depois de muita pesquisa e anos de experiência com linux desenvolvi o que chamo de instalação mínima

Alguns conceitos da minha instalação – Não tem gerenciador de login gráfico. – Precisar habilitar o root, na unha e você usa isso. – Não tem menus, os aplicativos são chamados via tecla de atalho ou docks. – Não tem menu para desligar. – Não é um desktop, usa apenas um gerenciador de Janelas. – Aqui tudo é minimalista, não é bonito também não quer dizer que é feio, é apenas simples faz o necessário. – Não importa a versão do ubuntu, atual ou não essa técnica quase nunca mudará.

Seria bom/Pré-Requisitos – Se você tem conceitos de particionamento. – Se você já instalou um Debian. – Se você sabe usar o vim. – Conexão com internet via placa de rede 10/100 (sim tem que ser assim).

Introdução A idéia é usar a instalação mínima do Ubuntu (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD), onde é bem parecida com a NetInstall do Debian. Iremos baixar a imagem(12 ~ 13MB) do link acima e queimar em um cd rom e dar boot.

Vamos usar o assistente de instalação, e não selecionaremos nenhum pacote na instalação, tudo sera instalado via linha de comando usando o apt. Pra quem já instalou usando o anaconda da RedHat não terá problemas, qualquer ser capaz de ler consegue instalar. Esta é a primeira tela exibida após o boot, selecione o menu

Va seguindo o instalador conforme as telas, não quer que eu fique explicando tudo né?

Coloque o nome que quiser, este é o nome da sua maquina pense em algo inspirador.

Aqui você estara selecionando daonde pacotes serão baixados.

Se não tiver proxy de um [enter], se tiver pesquise no google como configurar.

Chegamos a parte onde todo usuário de windows faz cagada, na configuração das particões, bom use o método manual, não vou entrar em detalhes, pra esse tutorial eu criei uma partição só.

Após criar, FINISH!

Aguarde, vai demorar, o instalador esta baixando o minimo para poder instalar o sistema, no debian o cd é de 170mb essa parte é mais rápida.

O nome do usuario, eu coloquei “lion”, coloque ai o seu usuário.

senha é bom por né.

Aqui você tem a opção de encriptar seus dados, tudo que estiver no /home/ você deve pro governo? eu encriptei.

Aqui você pode selecionar a primeira opção, eu prefiro atualizar manualmente.

Neste tela desmarque tudo, isso faz você ser o cara livre do sistema, aguarde pois vai demorar.

Grub é o gerenciador de boot, instale ele ai sem medo.

Cara se você chegou nessa tela eu já estou orgulhoso, pois provavelmente não fez nenhuma cagada.

Logue-se com seu usuário, meu caso “lion” (que coisa gay figura 24 ainda).

**Apartir daqui acabou as figurinhas fio, espero que você saiba o mínimo de VI.

Torna-se root Isso é primordio no linux, sempre somos o ROOT, o Ubuntu tem essa filosofia para você não fazer cagada, mas na vida uma boa técnica de aprendizado é fazendo cagada, então vamos habilitar o root. Calma usaremos o root para tarefas como instalar novos software, mas a execução e configuração de nosso ambiente será com nosso usuário.

$ sudo passwd root

Pronto a partir de agora os comandos começados com # quer dizer que você tem que estar logado como root, e quando estiver $ você deve executar com seu usuário.

Loge-se como root vamos usar bastante de um $su ou entre num novo tty como root.

Instalando o vim

```

apt-get install vim

``` (repare # você tem que estar logado como root)

Removendo o boot-splash Amigos estamos falando de uma maquina limpa, o boot splash só come memória. Faça um backup antes e depois edite o arquivo “/boot/grub/grub.cfg” procure a palavra splash e apague somente ela e salve o arquivo. É necessário dar diretos de gravação e depois volte como somente leitura.

Removendo Mensagem de boas vindas MOTD Logo após o login, é exibida uma mensagem de boas vindas enorme do ubuntu, eu não gosto dela, nem do debian eu gostava e eu a removia editando o script “/etc/init.d/boot-misc.sh” mas no ubuntu esse arquivo não existe. Depois de muito fuçar eu descobri que removendo os arquivos do diretorio “/etc/update-motd.d/” a mensagem some, pra mim basta, também removi o conteudo do arquivo /var/run/motd ;

UPDATE Dica do comentário do Marcelo Godim Ele é gerenciado pelo pam_motd basta ir em /etc/pam.d nos arquivos “login” e “sshd” e comentar essas linhas abaixo: login:

session optional pam_motd.so

sshd:

session optional pam_motd.so # [1]

Mudando mensagem da versão

Dica velha edite o arquivo “/etc/issue” coloque o que preferir.

——Se você não precisa de modo gráfico a instalação terminou aqui.

Alterando o sources.list adicionando outros repositórios

Edite o arquivo /etc/apt/sources.list e deixe assim, basicamente adicionados pacotes do site Medibuntu, se prefereir siga esses passos é melhor do que editar o arquivo.

Instalando o resto dos pacotes

apt-get install xserver-xorg xinit alsa-base alsa-utils openbox obconf obmenu feh nitrogen tint2 k3b conky gmrun pcmanfm gtk-theme-switch ssh smbfs smbclient dosfstools setserial usbutils leafpad x11-apps openbox-themes terminator chromium-browser xcompmgr gcc g++ openjdk-6-jdk mysql-server mysql-query-browser gftp gcc-avr avrdude imagemagick gparted ntfs-3g file-roller zip unrar gpicview gtk2-engines gnome-icon-theme-gartoon vim unace rar unrar zip unzip p7zip-full p7zip-rar sharutils uudeview mpack lha arj cabextract file-roller pidgin pidgin-data pidgin-lastfm pidgin-guifications msn-pecan pidgin-musictracker pidgin-plugin-pack pidgin-themes mplayer vlc cairo-dock w32codecs audacious

Vai dormir, seila vai baixar ai uns 500mb, você pode tirar ou por o que quiser ai isso é minha instalação.

Como entrar no modo gráfico?

Logue-se com seu usuário

$startx

O comando antigo, simples, que dei a primeira vez no meu conectiva 4.

Este é o resultado final, mas para isso vamos algumas dicas.

Toda incialização dos aplicativos eu concentrei no .config/openbox/autostart.sh segue o meu ai

```

Set desktop wallpaper

nitrogen –restore &

Enable Eyecandy – off by default

xcompmgr -cCfF -r7 -o.65 -l-10 -t-8 &

Launch network manager applet

(sleep 4s && nm-applet) &

Launch clipboard manager

(sleep 1s && parcellite) &

Uncomment to enable system updates at boot

(sleep 180s && system-update) &

cairo-dock &

Launch Conky

conky -q &

Launch panel

tint2 & ``` Configurando teclas de atalho, edite o arquivo .config/openbox/rc.xml, vá até a seção keybinds as minhas são essas abaixo:

<keybind key=”W-a”><action name=”Execute”> <execute>audacious</execute></action></keybind><keybind key=”W-1″><action name=”Execute”> <execute>xcompmgr -cCfF -r7 -o.65 -l-10 -t-8</execute></action></keybind><keybind key=”W-2″><action name=”Execute”> <execute>pkill xcompmgr</execute></action></keybind><keybind key=”W-a”><action name=”Execute”> <execute>audacious</execute></action></keybind><keybind key=”W-e”><action name=”Execute”> <execute>pcmanfm</execute></action></keybind><keybind key=”W-g”><action name=”Execute”> <startupnotify> <enabled>true</enabled> <name>transset</name> </startupnotify> <command>transset .50</command></action></keybind><keybind key=”W-h”><action name=”Execute”> <startupnotify><enabled>true</enabled><name>transset 1</name></startupnotify><command>transset 1</command></action></keybind><keybind key=”W-l”><action name=”Execute”><startupnotify><enabled>true</enabled><name>Lock screen</name></startupnotify><command>gnome-screensaver-command -l</command></action></keybind><keybind key=”W-t”><action name=”Execute”><execute>terminator</execute></action></keybind><keybind key=”W-r”> <action name=”Execute”> <execute>gmrun</execute> </action></keybind>

Pesquise como instalar temas GTK, configurar o TINT2 (desk bar), Cairo Dock, também tem muitas configurações de openbox na internet.

Esse tutorial vem de anos de convivio com linux, é duro passar tudo a limpo aqui, uma dica e testar o Linux Crunch-Bang aprendi muitas customizações com ele.

blog #tech

@ c11cf5f8:4928464d

Let's hear some of your latest Bitcoin purchases, feel free to include links to the shops or merchants you bought from too.

If you missed our last thread, here are some of the items stackers recently spent their sats on.

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/676757

@ c6f7077f:ad5d48fd

“The more you learn about something, the more you realize you know nothing.” This saying resonates deeply with me. The truth is, no one really has all the big answers. Many in the scientific community seem to pretend they do. Let’s explore this further.

Consider the Most Fundamental Questions

1. The Origin of the Universe
2. The Origin of Life on Earth

The Origin of the Universe

You might think we have a solid answer: the Big Bang. However, this explanation has its limitations, and calling it a “start” can be misleading. In fact, this theory might be entirely wrong. New research challenges the Big Bang theory, and I highly recommend listening to Sir Roger Penrose for a deeper understanding.

The only substantial evidence we have is the universe's expansion. Penrose proposes a different hypothesis: the endless expansion and contraction of the universe. This idea doesn’t contradict our current understanding.

Thus, the evidence for the Big Bang and Penrose’s theory are both radically different, yet neither can be definitively proven over the other. This highlights the limitations of our current understanding.

The Origin of Life on Earth

The origin of life is even more complex. Life requires three essential components: - Proteins for basic functioning - RNA for storing and replicating genes - Lipids (cell walls) to create separation from the environment

Mathematical models suggest that while proteins and lipids have a reasonable probability of forming, the creation of RNA seems nearly impossible through random mutations in a short time frame. The best explanations indicate that we either lack crucial information or that these RNA molecules—and life as a whole—might have come from outside sources. Some scholars even question the entire random mutation model.

The Question of Certainty

If scientists don’t know the answers, why do they pretend they do? In my humble opinion, It seems they do this to distance science from religion and to close the discussion before the wealthiest can fit God into the narrative, Interestingly, I’m not alone in believing they closed the books too early.

Reclaiming Control of Science and Education

The best way to reclaim control of science and education is to learn. If you’re looking for a starting point, I highly recommend: - “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking for physics - “Sapiens” or “The Selfish Gene” for evolutionary biology

All three are excellent starting points—densely packed with information and covering a wide range of topics in a concise and accessible manner.

@ 9358c676:9f2912fc

Introduction

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) began as a pandemic in the 1980s. In its early days, it was seen as a certain death sentence, a taboo associated with marginalized groups, and it highlighted the failures of poverty in accessing healthcare. Gradually, the struggle for life and the suffering of those who are no longer with us, including both famous and anonymous individuals, became visible.

Today, 40 years later, HIV is presented as a chronic disease with effective treatment. Patients living with HIV who receive appropriate treatment have no detectable virus in their circulating blood, enjoy a good quality of life, and are more concerned about other aspects of their health during medical consultations, almost forgetting their condition. For these patients, daily treatment is the cure, similar to someone taking a pill every day for high blood pressure or diabetes.

The Global Impact

HIV is a lentivirus, a subgroup of retroviruses composed of RNA. The natural history of HIV infection involves an attack on the immune system, particularly targeting CD4 cells, where chronic deterioration can lead to the acquisition of infectious and oncological diseases that may be fatal over the years, resulting in acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

Interestingly, there is a small group of people known as "elite controllers" who manage to control HIV infection without treatment and remain healthy for much of their lives, despite having a hidden deep viral reservoir. The primary modes of transmission are sexual, followed by blood and vertical transmission from mother to child, with the first mode predominating today.

Today, in the downward trend of the HIV epidemic, it is estimated that 39 million people are living with HIV worldwide. Depending on the region, nearly half of this population belongs to at-risk groups, such as men who have sex with men (MSM), transgender individuals, sex workers, and people who inject drugs. These vulnerable groups are especially important for prevention efforts. However, little is done for prevention in the general population, which sometimes represents the other half of the cake of people living with HIV (PLWH).

Breaking the Dogma: The Concept of Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U)

The introduction of highly effective antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in 1994 broke the curve of the HIV epidemic. The introduction of new medications with fewer side effects and greater effectiveness in controlling the virus has been crucial. In 2007, the launch of Raltegravir as the first viral integrase inhibitor marked a milestone in current treatments, allowing patients to effectively control the virus within 3 to 6 months.

The positive impact of these treatments led health organizations to launch the concept of undetectable = untransmittable (U=U) to impact the general population and at-risk groups, updating the dogma and eradicating stigma: a patient living with HIV who maintains an undetectable viral load in their blood through treatment will not transmit HIV sexually.

Although this concept has transformed the social dynamics and stigma surrounding the disease, adherence to treatment must be complete to achieve this new paradigm.

Prophylaxis as a Method to Prevent HIV in Healthy Populations

The correct use of condoms has been the cornerstone of HIV prevention and other sexually transmitted infections over the years. However, it is not the only tool available today and can be complemented for comprehensive sexual health.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is a novel strategy that involves administering antiretroviral medication to vulnerable groups before they are exposed to HIV (MSM, transgender individuals, sex workers, people who inject drugs). It involves taking medication daily, effectively reducing the risk of contracting HIV and providing protection to these groups. It is similar to taking a contraceptive pill daily. It has had a very positive impact on protecting these populations. In the Americas, it has been successfully implemented in the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. Other countries, although with some delay, are now implementing this strategy.

Post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), on the other hand, is a strategy that involves administering antiretroviral treatment after a potential exposure to HIV. If the treatment is administered within the first 72 hours and maintained for 4 weeks, the chances of contracting HIV decrease substantially.

Both strategies have been remarkably successful in preventing HIV in at-risk populations and healthy populations, although their dissemination and awareness remain limited.

https://image.nostr.build/08682bf763ade56741d8e4c8c6d870cb8d71ab7d72c605b9aa805af2234348ff.jpg

The New Horizon: Long-Acting Antiretrovirals, HIV Vaccines, and Promising Therapies

The introduction of viral integrase inhibitors and new nucleoside analogs in the last 15 years has allowed for the availability of safe drugs with minimal side effects in the treatment of HIV, many of which are included in a single pill regimen per day. However, the pharmaceutical industry continues to diversify the offerings in a healthy manner.

Cabotegravir is a new long-acting integrase inhibitor that is administered via injection. Combined with Rilpivirine, it has proven to be effective and safe in the treatment of HIV, with injections every 2 months. This has revolutionized treatment for people who are tired of taking pills daily, as well as in PrEP, where effective prevention against HIV can be achieved with injections every 2 months for at-risk groups.

Additionally, subdermal implants of Islatravir, a new long-acting nucleoside analog, are being tested as a PrEP strategy. Similar to monthly hormonal contraceptive injections or hormonal contraceptive implants, this strategy has proven effective in at-risk groups.

Regarding the HIV vaccine, we have been developing it for over two decades, with advances and setbacks. While vaccines have shown promising results in terms of safety and antibody generation, we still need to await conclusive phase III results demonstrating their effectiveness in at-risk groups and the general population.

The Eradication of HIV and Patients Cured Without Treatment

While current treatment allows for the elimination of HIV from the bloodstream and sexual transmission, there remains a reservoir in some deep immune cells that have been infected by the retrovirus, which contain latent HIV DNA and have the potential to reactivate if daily treatment is interrupted.

However, there are patients who have managed to eliminate HIV from their bodies, including these deep cells, and HIV is undetectable upon discontinuation of treatment. These cases are very rare, with only 7 to 8 individuals being the subject of intensive scientific study. Among them are the "Berlin patient" of Germany and "City of Hope patient" from Argentina. Some of these cases involved patients under effective HIV treatment who underwent suppressive chemotherapy for bone marrow transplants and managed to eliminate these deep cells with latent HIV DNA.

Unfortunately, this treatment is not scalable for the entire HIV-positive population, both due to its cost and potential side effects. However, "Shock and Kill" strategies have been proposed, aiming to use monoclonal antibodies to activate these latent cells during HIV treatment, exposing them to antiretroviral medication for elimination, thereby eradicating these small reservoirs of HIV.

WHO Goals

The World Health Organization (WHO) has established clear objectives that are constantly updated to achieve the eradication of HIV in the population.

The updated goals of the WHO propose that, to end the HIV epidemic, three objectives must be met by the year 2025-2030:

1. 95% of people living with HIV must be diagnosed through testing.
2. 95% of diagnosed individuals must be on highly effective antiretroviral therapy (HAART).
3. 95% of those on HAART must have an undetectable viral load in their blood.

Developing and underdeveloped countries currently have an effectiveness rate for these strategies that disagree significantly.

https://image.nostr.build/ac6693df57aaca6dac0b06b5db9eb1a2757e7c08511edb0f11617e12653d3db5.png

Key Takeaways

• HIV has a cure, and the cure is permanent treatment.
• Treatment for HIV is free and accessible to the population, as it is a public health impact disease.
• A person living with HIV who receives appropriate treatment will not transmit the virus sexually, will enjoy a full life without the disease, and can have children without HIV.
• In the event of a potential HIV exposure (such as unprotected sexual contact with an infrequent partner), you can go to a hospital within the first 72 hours to receive treatment that will prevent HIV infection.
• Just as we witnessed the eradication of smallpox from the face of the earth in 1978 due to scientific advances, we will live to see the eradication of HIV.

Autor

Kamo Weasel - MD Infectious Diseases - MD Internal Medicine - #DocChain Community npub1jdvvva54m8nchh3t708pav99qk24x6rkx2sh0e7jthh0l8efzt7q9y7jlj

Resources

1. World Health Organization (WHO)
2. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
3. UNAIDS

Bibliography

1. The natural history of HIV infection. DOI: 10.1097/COH.0b013e328361fa66
2. Changing Knowledge and Attitudes Towards HIV Treatment-as-Prevention and "Undetectable = Untransmittable": A Systematic Review. DOI: 10.1007/s10461-021-03296-8
3. Challenges of HIV diagnosis and management in the context of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), test and start and acute HIV infection: a scoping review. DOI: 10.1002/jia2.25419
4. Long-acting cabotegravir and rilpivirine dosed every 2 months in adults with HIV-1 infection (ATLAS-2M), 48-week results: a randomised, multicentre, open-label, phase 3b, non-inferiority study. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32666-0
5. Efficacy and safety of long-acting cabotegravir compared with daily oral tenofovir disoproxil fumarate plus emtricitabine to prevent HIV infection in cisgender men and transgender women who have sex with men 1 year after study unblinding: a secondary analysis of the phase 2b and 3 HPTN 083 randomised controlled trial. DOI: 10.1016/S2352-3018(23)00261-8
6. Safety and immunogenicity of a subtype C ALVAC-HIV (vCP2438) vaccine prime plus bivalent subtype C gp120 vaccine boost adjuvanted with MF59 or alum in healthy adults without HIV (HVTN 107): A phase 1/2a randomized trial. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004360
7. Shock and kill within the CNS: A promising HIV eradication approach?. DOI: 10.1002/JLB.5VMR0122-046RRR

@ 41d0a715:9733c512

Blaise Pascal: 'I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.'

Some of you Stackers need to spend a little more time to make your posts short and sweet. Sometimes I realize a post doesn't even have a point after wasting time reading it. A long poorly written post is a waste of my time and yours too!

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/676136

@ 655a7cf1:d0510794

I can't stop thinking about it. When I go to clear out a cave in Skyrim I always find the troll the spider some version of some enemy with gold. I ask myself how did they get this gold.? Is there someone in the cities that goes to and fro to have commerce with underworld. If so what would this market look like. Would it be trade based or commodity based. Sometimes in these caves I can find upwards of 100 gold I can also find individuals with upwards of 20 gold on them. Assuming they live paycheck to paycheck this is a moderate size of money they're carrying around from week to week. It tells me that the trade is doing well. Am I completely psychotic for constantly thinking about this? Does anybody else thought about this or done any research or have any links that I can find?

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/673609

@ 8cb60e21:5f2deaea

@ 472f440f:5669301e

I had the pleasure of sitting back down with Will Reeves, Founder and CEO of Fold, on TFTC last week to discuss Fold's journey from a startup to (soon to be) a publicly listed company. I particularly liked this conversation because it was a great lens into the grit it takes to run a successful bitcoin company.

https://fountain.fm/episode/1FrspxmpK5bsoReGx73n

Building a successful company is extremely hard in its own right. Building a successful bitcoin company is significantly harder considering the fact that you're building a company in parallel with a nascent and volatile monetary asset that is monetizing in real time. Bitcoin adoption comes in waves. People flood in when the price is ripping and fade out when the price corrects and goes into a multi-year bear market before the tide comes back in. This means that your potential user base is expanding and contracting more than it would be in other industries. As a company you need to be able to absorb the incoming waves of new adopters and then capture and retain the users who stick around for the bear market.

To do this correctly, a founder and their team needs to thread many needles. First, can you assemble a team that can actually build something? Second, can you bring a product to market that people actually use because it provides value to them? Third, can you stick out against the crowd? So on and so forth. One of the most important aspects of building a bitcoin company during bitcoin's monetization phase is timing. There are many great ideas that people have in terms of companies, products and tools that can built using bitcoin. There are sci-fi futures that can be built today on bitcoin if people really wanted to.

The problem that arises is that adoption and understanding of bitcoin are at a point where, even though a functional product could be brought to market, it won't be adopted by a large number of people because there 1.) aren't enough people who would understand how to use it and 2.) for the people who do understand how to use it and could benefit from it, the universe of people they can interact with using that product is minuscule.

Timing is everything. And I think Fold nailed the timing of their product. Allowing people to passively stack sats by offering a product that enables them to go about their daily spending and get sats back instead of cash back rewards is a great first-touch bitcoin experience. Once Fold found their sticky user base and perfected their sats back experience, they began expanding their product offering to provide their users with more bitcoin services. Buy/sell bitcoin in-app, bill pay for sats back, and more. They'll eventually roll out a credit card and additional financial services. Start simple, provide something of value, nail the timing and then expand from there. That seems to be the recipe.

For any founders in the space reading this, I highly recommend you listen to the episode. Particularly for the advice Will gives about knowing when to sprint on product and when to lean into growth. Bear markets are for building and bull markets are for casting the widest net possible and capturing as many new users as possible.

At Ten31 we are extremely proud to back Fold and a number of other companies in the bitcoin space that understand the intricacies described above. We work with some of the best founders in the world. Founders who know how to eat glass with the best of them. Bitcoin can be a cruel mistress and no one knows that more intimately than the founders building bitcoin companies.

---

Final thought...

The NFL having a week 1 game in Brazil should get Roger Godell fired.

Enjoy your weekend, freaks.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Nostr: a quick introduction, attempt #2

Nostr doesn't subscribe to any ideals of "free speech" as these belong to the realm of politics and assume a big powerful government that enforces a common ruleupon everybody else.

Nostr instead is much simpler, it simply says that servers are private property and establishes a generalized framework for people to connect to all these servers, creating a true free market in the process. In other words, Nostr is the public road that each market participant can use to build their own store or visit others and use their services.

(Of course a road is never truly public, in normal cases it's ran by the government, in this case it relies upon the previous existence of the internet with all its quirks and chaos plus a hand of government control, but none of that matters for this explanation).

More concretely speaking, Nostr is just a set of definitions of the formats of the data that can be passed between participants and their expected order, i.e. messages between clients (i.e. the program that runs on a user computer) and relays (i.e. the program that runs on a publicly accessible computer, a "server", generally with a domain-name associated) over a type of TCP connection (WebSocket) with cryptographic signatures. This is what is called a "protocol" in this context, and upon that simple base multiple kinds of sub-protocols can be added, like a protocol for "public-square style microblogging", "semi-closed group chat" or, I don't know, "recipe sharing and feedback".

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Drivechain

Understanding Drivechain requires a shift from the paradigm most bitcoiners are used to. It is not about "trustlessness" or "mathematical certainty", but game theory and incentives. (Well, Bitcoin in general is also that, but people prefer to ignore it and focus on some illusion of trustlessness provided by mathematics.)

Here we will describe the basic mechanism (simple) and incentives (complex) of "hashrate escrow" and how it enables a 2-way peg between the mainchain (Bitcoin) and various sidechains.

The full concept of "Drivechain" also involves blind merged mining (i.e., the sidechains mine themselves by publishing their block hashes to the mainchain without the miners having to run the sidechain software), but this is much easier to understand and can be accomplished either by the BIP-301 mechanism or by the Spacechains mechanism.

How does hashrate escrow work from the point of view of Bitcoin?

A new address type is created. Anything that goes in that is locked and can only be spent if all miners agree on the Withdrawal Transaction (WT^) that will spend it for 6 months. There is one of these special addresses for each sidechain.

To gather miners' agreement bitcoind keeps track of the "score" of all transactions that could possibly spend from that address. On every block mined, for each sidechain, the miner can use a portion of their coinbase to either increase the score of one WT^ by 1 while decreasing the score of all others by 1; or they can decrease the score of all WT^s by 1; or they can do nothing.

Once a transaction has gotten a score high enough, it is published and funds are effectively transferred from the sidechain to the withdrawing users.

If a timeout of 6 months passes and the score doesn't meet the threshold, that WT^ is discarded.

What does the above procedure mean?

It means that people can transfer coins from the mainchain to a sidechain by depositing to the special address. Then they can withdraw from the sidechain by making a special withdraw transaction in the sidechain.

The special transaction somehow freezes funds in the sidechain while a transaction that aggregates all withdrawals into a single mainchain WT^, which is then submitted to the mainchain miners so they can start voting on it and finally after some months it is published.

Now the crucial part: the validity of the WT^ is not verified by the Bitcoin mainchain rules, i.e., if Bob has requested a withdraw from the sidechain to his mainchain address, but someone publishes a wrong WT^ that instead takes Bob's funds and sends them to Alice's main address there is no way the mainchain will know that. What determines the "validity" of the WT^ is the miner vote score and only that. It is the job of miners to vote correctly -- and for that they may want to run the sidechain node in SPV mode so they can attest for the existence of a reference to the WT^ transaction in the sidechain blockchain (which then ensures it is ok) or do these checks by some other means.

What? 6 months to get my money back?

Yes. But no, in practice anyone who wants their money back will be able to use an atomic swap, submarine swap or other similar service to transfer funds from the sidechain to the mainchain and vice-versa. The long delayed withdraw costs would be incurred by few liquidity providers that would gain some small profit from it.

Why bother with this at all?

Drivechains solve many different problems:

It enables experimentation and new use cases for Bitcoin

Issued assets, fully private transactions, stateful blockchain contracts, turing-completeness, decentralized games, some "DeFi" aspects, prediction markets, futarchy, decentralized and yet meaningful human-readable names, big blocks with a ton of normal transactions on them, a chain optimized only for Lighting-style networks to be built on top of it.

These are some ideas that may have merit to them, but were never actually tried because they couldn't be tried with real Bitcoin or inferfacing with real bitcoins. They were either relegated to the shitcoin territory or to custodial solutions like Liquid or RSK that may have failed to gain network effect because of that.

It solves conflicts and infighting

Some people want fully private transactions in a UTXO model, others want "accounts" they can tie to their name and build reputation on top; some people want simple multisig solutions, others want complex code that reads a ton of variables; some people want to put all the transactions on a global chain in batches every 10 minutes, others want off-chain instant transactions backed by funds previously locked in channels; some want to spend, others want to just hold; some want to use blockchain technology to solve all the problems in the world, others just want to solve money.

With Drivechain-based sidechains all these groups can be happy simultaneously and don't fight. Meanwhile they will all be using the same money and contributing to each other's ecosystem even unwillingly, it's also easy and free for them to change their group affiliation later, which reduces cognitive dissonance.

It solves "scaling"

Multiple chains like the ones described above would certainly do a lot to accomodate many more transactions that the current Bitcoin chain can. One could have special Lightning Network chains, but even just big block chains or big-block-mimblewimble chains or whatnot could probably do a good job. Or even something less cool like 200 independent chains just like Bitcoin is today, no extra features (and you can call it "sharding"), just that would already multiply the current total capacity by 200.

Use your imagination.

It solves the blockchain security budget issue

The calculation is simple: you imagine what security budget is reasonable for each block in a world without block subsidy and divide that for the amount of bytes you can fit in a single block: that is the price to be paid in satoshis per byte. In reasonable estimative, the price necessary for every Bitcoin transaction goes to very large amounts, such that not only any day-to-day transaction has insanely prohibitive costs, but also Lightning channel opens and closes are impracticable.

So without a solution like Drivechain you'll be left with only one alternative: pushing Bitcoin usage to trusted services like Liquid and RSK or custodial Lightning wallets. With Drivechain, though, there could be thousands of transactions happening in sidechains and being all aggregated into a sidechain block that would then pay a very large fee to be published (via blind merged mining) to the mainchain. Bitcoin security guaranteed.

It keeps Bitcoin decentralized

Once we have sidechains to accomodate the normal transactions, the mainchain functionality can be reduced to be only a "hub" for the sidechains' comings and goings, and then the maximum block size for the mainchain can be reduced to, say, 100kb, which would make running a full node very very easy.

Can miners steal?

Yes. If a group of coordinated miners are able to secure the majority of the hashpower and keep their coordination for 6 months, they can publish a WT^ that takes the money from the sidechains and pays to themselves.

Will miners steal?

No, because the incentives are such that they won't.

Although it may look at first that stealing is an obvious strategy for miners as it is free money, there are many costs involved:

1. The cost of ceasing blind-merged mining returns -- as stealing will kill a sidechain, all the fees from it that miners would be expected to earn for the next years are gone;
2. The cost of Bitcoin price going down: If a steal is successful that will mean Drivechains are not safe, therefore Bitcoin is less useful, and miner credibility will also be hurt, which are likely to cause the Bitcoin price to go down, which in turn may kill the miners' businesses and savings;
3. The cost of coordination -- assuming miners are just normal businesses, they just want to do their work and get paid, but stealing from a Drivechain will require coordination with other miners to conduct an immoral act in a way that has many pitfalls and is likely to be broken over the months;
4. The cost of miners leaving your mining pool: when we talked about "miners" above we were actually talking about mining pools operators, so they must also consider the risk of miners migrating from their mining pool to others as they begin the process of stealing;
5. The cost of community goodwill -- when participating in a steal operation, a miner will suffer a ton of backlash from the community. Even if the attempt fails at the end, the fact that it was attempted will contribute to growing concerns over exaggerated miners power over the Bitcoin ecosystem, which may end up causing the community to agree on a hard-fork to change the mining algorithm in the future, or to do something to increase participation of more entities in the mining process (such as development or cheapment of new ASICs), which have a chance of decreasing the profits of current miners.

Another point to take in consideration is that one may be inclined to think a newly-created sidechain or a sidechain with relatively low usage may be more easily stolen from, since the blind merged mining returns from it (point 1 above) are going to be small -- but the fact is also that a sidechain with small usage will also have less money to be stolen from, and since the other costs besides 1 are less elastic at the end it will not be worth stealing from these too.

All of the above consideration are valid only if miners are stealing from good sidechains. If there is a sidechain that is doing things wrong, scamming people, not being used at all, or is full of bugs, for example, that will be perceived as a bad sidechain, and then miners can and will safely steal from it and kill it, which will be perceived as a good thing by everybody.

What do we do if miners steal?

Paul Sztorc has suggested in the past that a user-activated soft-fork could prevent miners from stealing, i.e., most Bitcoin users and nodes issue a rule similar to this one to invalidate the inclusion of a faulty WT^ and thus cause any miner that includes it in a block to be relegated to their own Bitcoin fork that other nodes won't accept.

This suggestion has made people think Drivechain is a sidechain solution backed by user-actived soft-forks for safety, which is very far from the truth. Drivechains must not and will not rely on this kind of soft-fork, although they are possible, as the coordination costs are too high and no one should ever expect these things to happen.

If even with all the incentives against them (see above) miners do still steal from a good sidechain that will mean the failure of the Drivechain experiment. It will very likely also mean the failure of the Bitcoin experiment too, as it will be proven that miners can coordinate to act maliciously over a prolonged period of time regardless of economic and social incentives, meaning they are probably in it just for attacking Bitcoin, backed by nation-states or something else, and therefore no Bitcoin transaction in the mainchain is to be expected to be safe ever again.

Why use this and not a full-blown trustless and open sidechain technology?

Because it is impossible.

If you ever heard someone saying "just use a sidechain", "do this in a sidechain" or anything like that, be aware that these people are either talking about "federated" sidechains (i.e., funds are kept in custody by a group of entities) or they are talking about Drivechain, or they are disillusioned and think it is possible to do sidechains in any other manner.

No, I mean a trustless 2-way peg with correctness of the withdrawals verified by the Bitcoin protocol!

That is not possible unless Bitcoin verifies all transactions that happen in all the sidechains, which would be akin to drastically increasing the blocksize and expanding the Bitcoin rules in tons of ways, i.e., a terrible idea that no one wants.

What about the Blockstream sidechains whitepaper?

Yes, that was a way to do it. The Drivechain hashrate escrow is a conceptually simpler way to achieve the same thing with improved incentives, less junk in the chain, more safety.

Isn't the hashrate escrow a very complex soft-fork?

Yes, but it is much simpler than SegWit. And, unlike SegWit, it doesn't force anything on users, i.e., it isn't a mandatory blocksize increase.

Why should we expect miners to care enough to participate in the voting mechanism?

Because it's in their own self-interest to do it, and it costs very little. Today over half of the miners mine RSK. It's not blind merged mining, it's a very convoluted process that requires them to run a RSK full node. For the Drivechain sidechains, an SPV node would be enough, or maybe just getting data from a block explorer API, so much much simpler.

What if I still don't like Drivechain even after reading this?

That is the entire point! You don't have to like it or use it as long as you're fine with other people using it. The hashrate escrow special addresses will not impact you at all, validation cost is minimal, and you get the benefit of people who want to use Drivechain migrating to their own sidechains and freeing up space for you in the mainchain. See also the point above about infighting.

See also

• Podcast episode with Ruben Somsen and Aaron van Wirdum explaining Drivechain
• Alternatives to Drivechain
• Drivechain comparison with Ethereum

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Personagens de jogos e símbolos

A sensação de "ser" um personagem em um jogo ou uma brincadeira talvez seja o mais próximo que eu tenha conseguido chegar do entendimento de um símbolo religioso.

A hóstia consagrada é, segundo a religião, o corpo de Cristo, mas nossa mente moderna só consegue concebê-la como sendo uma representação do corpo de Cristo. Da mesma forma outras culturas e outras religiões têm símbolos parecidos, inclusive nos quais o próprio participante do ritual faz o papel de um deus ou de qualquer coisa parecida.

"Faz o papel" é de novo a interpretação da mente moderna. O sujeito ali é a coisa, mas ele ao mesmo tempo que é também sabe que não é, que continua sendo ele mesmo.

Nos jogos de videogame e brincadeiras infantis em que se encarna um personagem o jogador é o personagem. não se diz, entre os jogadores, que alguém está "encenando", mas que ele é e pronto. nem há outra denominação ou outro verbo. No máximo "encarnando", mas já aí já é vocabulário jornalístico feito para facilitar a compreensão de quem está de fora do jogo.

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Veterano não é dono de bixete

"VETERANO NÃO É DONO DE BIXETE". A frase em letras garrafais chama a atenção dos transeuntes neófitos. Paira sobre um cartaz amarelo que lista várias reclamações contra os "trotes machistas", que, na opinião do responsável pelo cartaz, "não é brincadeira, é opressão".

Eis aí um bizarro exemplo de como são as coisas: primeiro todos os universitários aprovam a idéia do trote, apoiam sua realização e até mesmo desejam sofrer o trote -- com a condição de o poderem aplicar eles mesmos depois --, louvam as maravilhas do mundo universitário, onde a suprema sabedoria se esconde atrás de rituais iniciáticos fora do alcance da imaginação do homem comum e rude, do pobre e do filhinho-de-papai das faculdades privadas; em suma: fomentam os mais baixos, os mais animalescos instintos, a crueldade primordial, destroem em si mesmos e nos colegas quaisquer valores civilizatórios que tivessem sobrado ali, ficando todos indistingüíveis de macacos agressivos e tarados.

Depois vêm aí com um cartaz protestar contra os assédios -- que sem dúvida acontecem em larguíssima escala -- sofridos pelas calouras de 17 anos e que, sendo também novatas no mundo universitário, ainda conservam um pouco de discernimento e pudor.

A incompreensão do fenômeno, porém, é tão grande, que os trotes não são identificados como um problema mental, uma doença que deve ser tratada e eliminada, mas como um sintoma da opressão machista dos homens às mulheres, um produto desta civilização paternalista que, desde que Deus é chamado "o Pai" e não "a Mãe", corrompe a benéfica, pura e angélica natureza do homem primitivo e o torna esta tão torpe criatura.

Na opinião dos autores desse cartaz é preciso, pois, continuar a destruir o que resta da cultura ocidental, e então esperar que haja trotes menos opressores.

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A Causa

o Princípios de Economia Política de Menger é o único livro que enfatiza a CAUSA o tempo todo. os cientistas todos parecem não saber, ou se esquecer sempre, que as coisas têm causa, e que o conhecimento verdadeiro é o conhecimento da causa das coisas.

a causa é uma categoria metafísica muito superior a qualquer correlação ou resultado de teste de hipótese, ela não pode ser descoberta por nenhum artifício econométrico ou reduzida à simples antecedência temporal estatística. a causa dos fenômenos não pode ser provada cientificamente, mas pode ser conhecida.

o livro de Menger conta para o leitor as causas de vários fenômenos econômicos e as interliga de forma que o mundo caótico da economia parece adquirir uma ordem no momento em que você lê. é uma sensação mágica e indescritível.

quando eu te o recomendei, queria é te imbuir com o espírito da busca pela causa das coisas. depois de ler aquilo, você está apto a perceber continuidade causal nos fenômenos mais complexos da economia atual, enxergar as causas entre toda a ação governamental e as suas várias consequências na vida humana. eu faço isso todos os dias e é a melhor sensação do mundo quando o caos das notícias do caderno de Economia do jornal -- que para o próprio jornalista que as escreveu não têm nenhum sentido (tanto é que ele escreve tudo errado) -- se incluem num sistema ordenado de causas e consequências.

provavelmente eu sempre erro em alguns ou vários pontos, mas ainda assim é maravilhoso. ou então é mais maravilhoso ainda quando eu descubro o erro e reinsiro o acerto naquela racionalização bela da ordem do mundo econômico que é a ordem de Deus.

em scrap para T.P.

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neuron.vim

I started using this neuron thing to create an update this same zettelkasten, but the existing vim plugin had too many problems, so I forked it and ended up changing almost everything.

Since the upstream repository was somewhat abandoned, most users and people who were trying to contribute upstream migrate to my fork too.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/neuron.vim

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On "zk-rollups" applied to Bitcoin

ZK rollups make no sense in bitcoin because there is no "cheap calldata". all data is already ~~cheap~~ expensive calldata.

There could be an onchain zk verification that allows succinct signatures maybe, but never a rollup.

What happens is: you can have one UTXO that contains multiple balances on it and in each transaction you can recreate that UTXOs but alter its state using a zk to compress all internal transactions that took place.

The blockchain must be aware of all these new things, so it is in no way "L2".

And you must have an entity responsible for that UTXO and for conjuring the state changes and zk proofs.

But on bitcoin you also must keep the data necessary to rebuild the proofs somewhere else, I'm not sure how can the third party responsible for that UTXO ensure that happens.

I think such a construct is similar to a credit card corporation: one central party upon which everybody depends, zero interoperability with external entities, every vendor must have an account on each credit card company to be able to charge customers, therefore it is not clear that such a thing is more desirable than solutions that are truly open and interoperable like Lightning, which may have its defects but at least fosters a much better environment, bringing together different conflicting parties, custodians, anyone.

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Splitpages

The simplest possible service: it splitted PDF pages in half.

Created specially to solve the problem of those scanned books that come with two pages side-by-side as if they were a single page and are much harder to read on Kindle because of that.

It required me to learn about Heroku Buildpacks though, and fork or contribute to a Heroku Buildpack that embedded a mupdf binary.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/splitpages
• https://splitpages.herokuapp.com/

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tempreites

My first library to get stars on GitHub, was a very stupid templating library that used just HTML and HTML attributes ("DSL-free"). I was inspired by http://microjs.com/ at the time and ended up not using the library. Probably no one ever did.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/tempreites

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litepub

A Go library that abstracts all the burdensome ActivityPub things and provides just the right amount of helpers necessary to integrate an existing website into the "fediverse" (what an odious name). Made for the gravity integration.

• https://godoc.org/github.com/fiatjaf/litepub

See also

-

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idea: Rumple

a payments network based on trust channels

This is the description of a Lightning-like network that will work only with credit or trust-based channels and exist alongside the normal Lightning Network. I imagine some people will think this is undesirable and at the same time very easy to do (such that if it doesn't exist yet it must be because no one cares), but in fact it is a very desirable thing -- which I hope I can establish below -- and at the same time a very non-trivial problem to solve, as the history of Ryan Fugger's Ripple project and posterior copies of it show.

Read these first to get the full context:

1. Ryan Fugger's Ripple
2. Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit
3. The Lightning Network solves the problem of the decentralized commit
4. Parallel Chains

Explanation about the name

Since we're copying the fundamental Ripple idea from Ryan Fugger and since the name "Ripple" is now associated with a scam coin called XRP, and since Ryan Fugger has changed the name of his old website "Ripplepay" to "Rumplepay", we will follow his lead here. If "Ripplepay" was the name of a centralized prototype to the open peer-to-peer network "Ripple", now that the centralized version is called "Rumplepay" the peer-to-peer version must be called "Rumple".

Now the idea

Basically we copy the Lightning Network, but without HTLCs or channels being opened and closed with funds committed to them on multisig Bitcoin transactions published to the blockchain. Instead we use pure trust relationships like the original Ripple concept.

And we use the blockchain commit method, but instead of spending an absurd amount of money to use the actual Bitcoin blockchain instead we use a parallel chain.

How exactly -- a protocol proposal attempt

It could work like this:

The parallel chain, or "Rumple Chain"

1. We define a parallel chain with a genesis block;
2. Following blocks must contain a. the ID of the previous block; b. a list of up to 32768 entries of arbitrary 32-byte values; c. an ID constituted by sha256(the previous block ID + the merkle root of all the entries)
3. To be mined, each parallel block must be included in the Bitcoin chain according as explained above.

Now that we have a structure for a simple "blockchain" that is completely useless, just blocks over blocks of meaningless values, we proceed to the next step of assigning meaning to these values.

The off-chain payments network, or "Rumple Network"

1. We create a network of nodes that can talk to each other via TCP messages (all details are the same as the Lightning Network, except where mentioned otherwise);
2. These nodes can create trust channels to each other. These channels are backed by nothing except the willingness of one peer to pay the other what is owed.
3. When Alice creates a trust channel with Bob (Alice trusts Bob), contrary to what happens in the Lightning Network, it's A that can immediately receive payments through that channel, and everything A receives will be an IOU from Bob to Alice. So Alice should never open a channel to Bob unless Alice trusts Bob. But also Alice can choose the amount of trust it has in Bob, she can, for example, open a very small channel with Bob, which means she will only lose a few satoshis if Bob decides to exit scam her. (in the original Ripple examples these channels were always depicted as friend relationships, and they can continue being that, but it's expected -- given the experience of the Lightning Network -- that the bulk of the channels will exist between users and wallet provider nodes that will act as hubs).
4. As Alice receive a payment through her channel with Bob, she becomes a creditor and Bob a debtor, i.e., the balance of the channel moves a little to her side. Now she can use these funds to make payments over that channel (or make a payment that combines funds from multiple channels using MPP).
5. If at any time Alice decides to close her channel with Bob, she can send all the funds she has standing there to somewhere else (for example, another channel she has with someone else, another wallet somewhere else, a shop that is selling some good or service, or a service that will aggregate all funds from all her channels and send a transaction to the Bitcoin chain on her behalf).
6. If at any time Bob leaves the network Alice is entitled by Bob's cryptographic signatures to knock on his door and demand payment, or go to a judge and ask him to force Bob to pay, or share the signatures and commitments online and hurt Bob's reputation with the rest of the network (but yes, none of these things is good enough and if Bob is a very dishonest person none of these things is likely to save Alice's funds).

The payment flow

1. Suppose there exists a route Alice->Bob->Carol and Alice wants to send a payment to Carol.
2. First Alice reads an invoice she received from Carol. The invoice (which can be pretty similar or maybe even the same as BOLT11) contains a payment hash h and information about how to reach Carol's node, optionally an amount. Let's say it's 100 satoshis.
3. Using the routing information she gathered, Alice builds an onion and sends it to Bob, at the same time she offers to Bob a "conditional IOU". That stands for a signed commitment that Alice will owe Bob an 100 satoshis if in the next 50 blocks of the Rumple Chain there appears a block containing the preimage p such that sha256(p) == h.
4. Bob peels the onion and discovers that he must forward that payment to Carol, so he forwards the peeled onion and offers a conditional IOU to Carol with the same h. Bob doesn't know Carol is the final recipient of the payment, it could potentially go on and on.
5. When Carol gets the conditional IOU from Bob, she makes a list of all the nodes who have announced themselves as miners (which is not something I have mentioned before, but nodes that are acting as miners will must announce themselves somehow) and are online and bidding for the next Rumple block. Each of these miners will have previously published a random 32-byte value v they they intend to include in their next block.
6. Carol sends payments through routes to all (or a big number) of these miners, but this time the conditional IOU contains two conditions (values that must appear in a block for the IOU to be valid): p such that sha256(p) == h (the same that featured in the invoice) and v (which must be unique and constant for each miner, something that is easily verifiable by Carol beforehand). Also, instead of these conditions being valid for the next 50 blocks they are valid only for the single next block.
7. Now Carol broadcasts p to the mempool and hopes one of the miners to which she sent conditional payments sees it and, allured by the possibility of cashing in Carol's payment, includes p in the next block. If that does not happen, Carol can try again in the next block.

Why bother with this at all?

1. The biggest advantage of Lightning is its openness

   It has been said multiple times that if trust is involved then we don't need Lightning, we can use Coinbase, or worse, Paypal. This is very wrong. Lightning is good specially because it serves as a bridge between Coinbase, Paypal, other custodial provider and someone running their own node. All these can transact freely across the network and pay each other without worrying about who is in which provider or setup.

   Rumple inherits that openness. In a Rumple Network anyone is free to open new trust channels and immediately route payments to anyone else.

   Also, since Rumple payments are also based on the reveal of a preimage it can do swaps with Lightning inside a payment route from day one (by which I mean one can pay from Rumple to Lightning and vice-versa).

2. Rumple fixes Lightning's fragility

   Lightning is too fragile.

   It's known that Lightning is vulnerable to multiple attacks -- like the flood-and-loot attack, for example, although not an attack that's easy to execute, it's still dangerous even if failed. Given the existence of these attacks, it's important to not ever open channels with random anonymous people. Some degree of trust must exist between peers.

   But one does not even have to consider attacks. The creation of HTLCs is a liability that every node has to do multiple times during its life. Every initiated, received or forwarded payment require adding one HTLC then removing it from the commitment transaction.

   Another issue that makes trust needed between peers is the fact that channels can be closed unilaterally. Although this is a feature, it is also a bug when considering high-fee environments. Imagine you pay $2 in fees to open a channel, your peer may close that unilaterally in the next second and then you have to pay another $15 to close the channel. The opener pays (this is also a feature that can double as a bug by itself). Even if it's not you opening the channel, a peer can open a channel with you, make a payment, then clone the channel, and now you're left with, say, an output of 800 satoshis, which is equal to zero if network fees are high.

   So you should only open channels with people you know and know aren't going to actively try to hack you and people who are not going to close channels and impose unnecessary costs on you. But even considering a fully trusted Lightning Network, even if -- to be extreme -- you only opened channels with yourself, these channels would still be fragile. If some HTLC gets stuck for any reason (peer offline or some weird small incompatibility between node softwares) and you're forced to close the channel because of that, there are the extra costs of sweeping these UTXO outputs plus the total costs of closing and reopening a channel that shouldn't have been closed in the first place. Even if HTLCs don't get stuck, a fee renegotiation event during a mempool spike may cause channels to force-close, become valueless or settle for very high closing fee.

   Some of these issues are mitigated by Eltoo, others by only having channels with people you trust. Others referenced above, plus the the griefing attack and in general the ability of anyone to spam the network for free with payments that can be pending forever or a lot of payments fail repeatedly makes it very fragile.

   Rumple solves most of these problems by not having to touch the blockchain at all. Fee negotiation makes no sense. Opening and closing channels is free. Flood-and-loot is a non-issue. The griefing attack can be still attempted as funds in trust channels must be reserved like on Lightning, but since there should be no theoretical limit to the number of prepared payments a channel can have, the griefing must rely on actual amounts being committed, which prevents large attacks from being performed easily.

3. Rumple fixes Lightning's unsolvable reputation issues

   In the Lightning Conference 2019, Rusty Russell promised there would be pre-payments on Lightning someday, since everybody was aware of potential spam issues and pre-payments would be the way to solve that. Fast-forward to November 2020 and these pre-payments have become an apparently unsolvable problem[^thread-402]: no one knows how to implement them reliably without destroying privacy completely or introducing worse problems.

   Replacing these payments with tables of reputation between peers is also an unsolved problem[^reputation-lightning], for the same reasons explained in the thread above.

4. Rumple solves the hot wallet problem

   Since you don't have to use Bitcoin keys or sign transactions with a Rumple node, only your channel trust is at risk at any time.

5. Rumple ends custodianship

   Since no one is storing other people's funds, a big hub or wallet provider can be used in multiple payment routes, but it cannot be immediately classified as a "custodian". At best, it will be a big debtor.

6. Rumple is fun

   Opening channels with strangers is boring. Opening channels with friends and people you trust even a little makes that relationship grow stronger and the trust be reinforced. (But of course, like it happens in the Lightning Network today, if Rumple is successful the bulk of trust will be from isolated users to big reliable hubs.)

Questions or potential issues

1. So many advantages, yes, but trusted? Custodial? That's easy and stupid!

   Well, an enormous part of the current Lightning Network (and also onchain Bitcoin wallets) already rests on trust, mainly trust between users and custodial wallet providers like ZEBEDEE, Alby, Wallet-of-Satoshi and others. Worse: on the current Lightning Network users not only trust, they also expose their entire transaction history to these providers[^hosted-channels].

   Besides that, as detailed in point 3 of the previous section, there are many unsolvable issues on the Lightning protocol that make each sovereign node dependent on some level of trust in its peers (and the network in general dependent on trusting that no one else will spam it to death).

   So, given the current state of the Lightning Network, to trust peers like Rumple requires is not a giant change -- but it is still a significant change: in Rumple you shouldn't open a large trust channel with someone just because it looks trustworthy, you must personally know that person and only put in what you're willing to lose. In known brands that have reputation to lose you can probably deposit more trust, same for long-term friends, and that's all. Still it is probably good enough, given the existence of MPP payments and the fact that the purpose of Rumple is to be a payments network for day-to-day purchases and not a way to buy real estate.

2. Why would anyone run a node in this parallel chain?

   I don't know. Ideally every server running a Rumple Network node will be running a Bitcoin node and a Rumple chain node. Besides using it to confirm and publish your own Rumple Network transactions it can be set to do BMM mining automatically and maybe earn some small fees comparable to running a Lightning routing node or a JoinMarket yield generator.

   Also it will probably be very lightweight, as pruning is completely free and no verification-since-the-genesis-block will take place.

3. What is the maturity of the debt that exists in the Rumple Network or its legal status?

   By default it is to be understood as being payable on demand for payments occurring inside the network (as credit can be used to forward or initiate payments by the creditor using that channel). But details of settlement outside the network or what happens if one of the peers disappears cannot be enforced or specified by the network.

   Perhaps some standard optional settlement methods (like a Bitcoin address) can be announced and negotiated upon channel creation inside the protocol, but nothing more than that.

[^thread-402]: Read at least the first 10 messages of the thread to see how naïve proposals like you and me could have thought about are brought up and then dismantled very carefully by the group of people most committed to getting Lightning to work properly. [^reputation-lightning]: See also the footnote at Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit. [^hosted-channels]: Although that second part can be solved by hosted channels.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

questo.email

This was a thing done in a brief period I liked the idea of "indiewebcamp", a stupid movement of people saying everybody should have their site and post their lives in it.

From the GitHub postmortem:

questo.email was a service that integrated email addresses into the indieweb ecosystem by providing email-to-note and email-to-webmention triggers, which could be used for people to comment through webmention using their email addresses, and be replied, and also for people to send messages from their sites directly to the email addresses of people they knew; Questo also worked as an IndieAuth provider that used people's email addresses and Mozilla Persona.

It was live from December 2014 through December 2015.

Here's how the home page looked:

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/questo.email

See also

• jekmentions, another thing related to "indieweb"

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Boardthreads

This was a very badly done service for turning a Trello list into a helpdesk UI.

Surprisingly, it had more paying users than Websites For Trello, which I was working on simultaneously and dedicating much more time to it.

The Neo4j database I used for this was a very poor choice, it was probably the cause of all the bugs.

-https://github.com/fiatjaf/boardthreads

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Webvatar

Like Gravatar, but using profile images from websites tagged with "microformats-2" tags, like people from the indiewebcamp movement liked. It falled back to favicon, gravatar and procedural avatar generators.

No one really used this, despite people saying they liked it. Since I was desperate to getting some of my programs appreciated by someone I even bought a domain. It was sad, but an enriching experience.

• https://github.com/fiatjaf/webvatar.com
• http://webvatar.com

See also

• jekmentions
• questo.email

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

The problem with ION

ION is a DID method based on a thing called "Sidetree".

I can't say for sure what is the problem with ION, because I don't understand the design, even though I have read all I could and asked everybody I knew. All available information only touches on the high-level aspects of it (and of course its amazing wonders) and no one has ever bothered to explain the details. I've also asked the main designer of the protocol, Daniel Buchner, but he may have thought I was trolling him on Twitter and refused to answer, instead pointing me to an incomplete spec on the Decentralized Identity Foundation website that I had already read before. I even tried to join the DIF as a member so I could join their closed community calls and hear what they say, maybe eventually ask a question, so I could understand it, but my entrance was ignored, then after many months and a nudge from another member I was told I had to do a KYC process to be admitted, which I refused.

One thing I know is:

• ION is supposed to provide a way to rotate keys seamlessly and automatically without losing the main identity (and the ION proponents also claim there are no "master" keys because these can also be rotated).
• ION is also not a blockchain, i.e. it doesn't have a deterministic consensus mechanism and it is decentralized, i.e. anyone can publish data to it, doesn't have to be a single central server, there may be holes in the available data and the protocol doesn't treat that as a problem.
• From all we know about years of attempts to scale Bitcoins and develop offchain protocols it is clear that you can't solve the double-spend problem without a central authority or a kind of blockchain (i.e. a decentralized system with deterministic consensus).
• Rotating keys also suffer from the double-spend problem: whenever you rotate a key it is as if it was "spent", you aren't supposed to be able to use it again.

The logic conclusion of the 4 assumptions above is that ION is flawed: it can't provide the key rotation it says it can if it is not a blockchain.

See also

• Excerpt of discussion about DIDs and ION

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

bolt12 problems

• clients can't programatically build new offers by changing a path or query params (services like zbd.gg or lnurl-pay.me won't work)
• impossible to use in a load-balanced custodian way -- since offers would have to be pregenerated and tied to a specific lightning node.
• the existence of fiat currency fields makes it so wallets have to fetch exchange rates from somewhere on the internet (or offer a bad user experience), using HTTP which hurts user privacy.
• the vendor field is misleading, can be phished very easily, not as safe as a domain name.
• onion messages are an improvement over fake HTLC-based payments as a way of transmitting data, for sure. but we must decide if they are (i) suitable for transmitting all kinds of data over the internet, a replacement for tor; or (ii) not something that will scale well or on which we can count on for the future. if there was proper incentivization for data transmission it could end up being (i), the holy grail of p2p communication over the internet, but that is a very hard problem to solve and not guaranteed to yield the desired scalability results. since not even hints of attempting to solve that are being made, it's safer to conclude it is (ii).

bolt12 limitations

• not flexible enough. there are some interesting fields defined in the spec, but who gets to add more fields later if necessary? very unclear.
• services can't return any actionable data to the users who paid for something. it's unclear how business can be conducted without an extra communication channel.

bolt12 illusions

• recurring payments is not really solved, it is just a spec that defines intervals. the actual implementation must still be done by each wallet and service. the recurring payment cannot be enforced, the wallet must still initiate the payment. even if the wallet is evil and is willing to initiate a payment without the user knowing it still needs to have funds, channels, be online, connected etc., so it's not as if the services could rely on the payments being delivered in time.
• people seem to think it will enable pushing payments to mobile wallets, which it does not and cannot.
• there is a confusion of contexts: it looks like offers are superior to lnurl-pay, for example, because they don't require domain names. domain names, though, are common and well-established among internet services and stores, because these services have websites, so this is not really an issue. it is an issue, though, for people that want to receive payments in their homes. for these, indeed, bolt12 offers a superior solution -- but at the same time bolt12 seems to be selling itself as a tool for merchants and service providers when it includes and highlights features as recurring payments and refunds.
• the privacy gains for the receiver that are promoted as being part of bolt12 in fact come from a separate proposal, blinded paths, which should work for all normal lightning payments and indeed are a very nice solution. they are (or at least were, and should be) independent from the bolt12 proposal. a separate proposal, which can be (and already is being) used right now, also improves privacy for the receiver very much anway, it's called trampoline routing.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

The Lightning Network solves the problem of the decentralized commit

Before reading this, see Ripple and the problem of the decentralized commit.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network can be thought as a system similar to Ripple: there are conditional IOUs (HTLCs) that are sent in "prepare"-like messages across a route, and a secret p that must travel from the final receiver backwards through the route until it reaches the initial sender and possession of that secret serves to prove the payment as well as to make the IOU hold true.

The difference is that if one of the parties don't send the "acknowledge" in time, the other has a trusted third-party with its own clock (that is the clock that is valid for everybody involved) to complain immediately at the timeout: the Bitcoin blockchain. If C has p and B isn't acknowleding it, C tells the Bitcoin blockchain and it will force the transfer of the amount from B to C.

Differences (or 1 upside and 3 downside)

1. The Lightning Network differs from a "pure" Ripple network in that when we send a "prepare" message on the Lightning Network, unlike on a pure Ripple network we're not just promising we will owe something -- instead we are putting the money on the table already for the other to get if we are not responsive.

2. The feature above removes the trust element from the equation. We can now have relationships with people we don't trust, as the Bitcoin blockchain will serve as an automated escrow for our conditional payments and no one will be harmed. Therefore it is much easier to build networks and route payments if you don't always require trust relationships.

3. However it introduces the cost of the capital. A ton of capital must be made available in channels and locked in HTLCs so payments can be routed. This leads to potential issues like the ones described in https://twitter.com/joostjgr/status/1308414364911841281.

4. Another issue that comes with the necessity of using the Bitcoin blockchain as an arbiter is that it may cost a lot in fees -- much more than the value of the payment that is being disputed -- to enforce it on the blockchain.[^closing-channels-for-nothing]

Solutions

Because the downsides listed above are so real and problematic -- and much more so when attacks from malicious peers are taken into account --, some have argued that the Lightning Network must rely on at least some trust between peers, which partly negate the benefit.

The introduction of purely trust-backend channels is the next step in the reasoning: if we are trusting already, why not make channels that don't touch the blockchain and don't require peers to commit large amounts of capital?

The reason is, again, the ambiguity that comes from the problem of the decentralized commit. Therefore hosted channels can be good when trust is required only from one side, like in the final hops of payments, but they cannot work in the middle of routes without eroding trust relationships between peers (however they can be useful if employed as channels between two nodes ran by the same person).

The next solution is a revamped pure Ripple network, one that solves the problem of the decentralized commit in a different way.

[^closing-channels-for-nothing]: That is even true when, for reasons of the payment being so small that it doesn't even deserve an actual HTLC that can be enforced on the chain (as per the protocol), even then the channel between the two nodes will be closed, only to make it very clear that there was a disagreement. Leaving it online would be harmful as one of the peers could repeat the attack again and again. This is a proof that ambiguity, in case of the pure Ripple network, is a very important issue.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

Eltoo

Read the paper, it's actually nice and small. You can read only everything up to section 4.2 and it will be enough. Done.

Ok, you don't want to. Or you tried but still want to read here.

Eltoo is a way of keeping payment channel state that works better than the original scheme used in Lightning. Since Lightning is a bunch of different protocols glued together, it can It replace just the part the previously dealed with keeping the payment channel.

Eltoo works like this: A and B want a payment channel, so they create a multisig transaction with deposits from both -- or from just one, doesn't matter. That transaction is only spendable if both cooperate. So if one of them is unresponsive or non-cooperative the other must have a way to get his funds back, so they also create an update transaction but don't publish it to the blockchain. That update transaction spends to a settlement transaction that then distributes the money back to A and B as their balances say.

If they are cooperative they can change the balances of the channel by just creating new update transactions and settlement transactions and number them like 1, 2, 3, 4 etc.

Solid arrows means a transaction is presigned to spend only that previous other transaction; dotted arrows mean it's a floating transaction that can spend any of the previous.

Why do they need and update and a settlement transaction?

Because if B publishes update2 (in which his balances were greater) A needs some time to publish update4 (the latest, which holds correct state of balances).

Each update transaction can be spent by any newer update transaction immediately or by its own specific settlement transaction only after some time -- or some blocks.

Hopefully you got that.

How do they close the channel?

If they're cooperative they can just agree to spend the funding transaction, that first multisig transaction I mentioned, to whatever destinations they want. If one party isn't cooperating the other can just publish the latest update transaction, wait a while, then publish its settlement transaction.

How is this better than the previous way of keeping channel states?

Eltoo is better because nodes only have to keep the last set of update and settlement transactions. Before they had to keep all intermediate state updates.

If it is so better why didn't they do it first?

Because they didn't have the idea. And also because they needed an update to the Bitcoin protocol that allowed the presigned update transactions to spend any of the previous update transactions. This protocol update is called SIGHASH_NOINPUT[^anyprevout], you've seen this name out there. By marking a transaction with SIGHASH_NOINPUT it enters a mystical state and becomes a floating transaction that can be bound to any other transaction as long as its unlocking script matches the locking script.

Why can't update2 bind itself to update4 and spend that?

Good question. It can. But then it can't anymore, because Eltoo uses OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY to ensure that doesn't actually check not a locktime, but a sequence. It's all arcane stuff.

And then Eltoo update transactions are numbered and their lock/unlock scripts will only match if a transaction is being spent by another one that's greater than it.

Do Eltoo channels expire?

No.

What is that "on-chain protocol" they talk about in the paper?

That's just an example to guide you through how the off-chain protocol works. Read carefully or don't read it at all. The off-chain mechanics is different from the on-chain mechanics. Repeating: the on-chain protocol is useless in the real world, it's just a didactic tool.

[^anyprevout]: Later SIGHASH_NOINPUT was modified to fit better with Taproot and Schnorr signatures and renamed to SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT.

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

doulas.club

A full catalog of all Brazilian doulas with data carefully scrapped from many websites that contained partial catalogs and some data manually included. All this packaged as a Couchapp and served directly from Cloudant.

This was done because the idea of doulas was good, but I spotted an issue: pregnant womwn should know many doulas before choosing one that would match well, therefore a full catalog with a lot of information was necessary.

This was a huge amount of work mostly wasted.

Many doulas who knew about this didn't like it and sent angry and offensive emails telling me to remove them. This was information one should know before choosing a doula.

See also

• About CouchDB

@ 3bf0c63f:aefa459d

idea: Hosted-channels Lightning wallet that runs in the browser

Communicates over HTTP with a server that is actually connected to the Lightning Network, but generates preimages and onions locally, doing everything like the Hosted Channels protocol says. Just the communication method changes.

Could use this library: https://www.npmjs.com/package/bolt04